To think people are getting noticeably stupider

[CurdinHenry]

At every level of capability it just feels like the species is in decline

So why aren't we educating the 'slovenly uneducated rednecks'?

You need to click on report if you want MN to read and/or delete a post. There is no one at MNHQ reading every single post.

yes this is true...and not just in a large family. In call the midwife, they showed the baby left in a cold sluice. The truth was both nastier and more merciful than that.

Pre the avalanche of tech, more was expected of us.

I'm not sure whether you're agreeing with me or not!? This backs up what I was saying - those living in poverty, which is generally those with significantly lower educational attainment, tend to have more children, as a demographic. Those children aren't less intelligent genetically. This is key. They're less privileged with opportunity.

OFSTED Inspectors in primary schools were expressing concerns many years ago about the deterioration of concentration in Primary School Children. A lead inspector said to me: "They don't engage with us. They treat us like walking wallpaper. They don't make eye contact. They don't engage." It was worrying then, and really has not got any better. Obviously this is a sweeping generalization, but they were observing a noticeable change in the behaviour in some primary school children, who now are not sometimes even toilet trained. Something has gone a bit strange, somewhere.

There was certainly coverage on the Today programme last week about a serious deterioration in the condition of children’s eyesight as a result of screen use. It was in the context of widespread close screen use in classrooms eg iPads and pointing out that eg Winchester have removed iPads from classrooms because they detract from teaching.

DDs old school insisted on iPads and locked them down so they couldn’t do anything ‘fun’. Within a week she’d figured out how to get onto Roblox 🙄

one thing we certainly shouldn’t underestimate kids on is their IT ability!!

I've been reading a book about the Mass Observation (MO) during the war.

Some of the participants are 15/16/17 and some of their offerings to the MO were incredible intelligent, thoughtful and insightful. I had to keep reminding myself that these were teenagers as they seemed so mature in their outlook and with such a wide vocabulary and knowledge of the politics and culture at the time.

We are regressing without question.

If they were contributing to MO they wouldn’t have been typical though.

Tbf an 18yo back then looked like a proper adult and now they look like babies!!

helicopter parenting can’t have helped

This 100%. TV adverts are infantile as hell. Comic strips and cartoons advertising things aimed at adults is constant. AI depicting things that cannot be true or possible and yet we are clearly expected to believe it. It's all pervasive.

TV presenters talk to us like we are four year olds and use the simplest dumbed down language possible so people have nothing to aspire to.

Adults dress like children and are infantile in their outlook on life and life bites them on the arse.

You only have to look at past exam papers to see that the expectations of students now is far below what it was.

Where OP? Is this about the UK or the U.S.A. as there as re references to Rednecks and U.S. IQ research?

Not true.

I often don't understand what they are trying to inform me about or are trying to sell me ? That " Ionos" ad for a start ...what's that all about ?!

I'm sorry but you're part of the problem with this view.

For millennia children learned to socialise by participating in family events, now adults find it too hard to parent so ipad it is.

Even respectable news outlets, e.g. BBC, Sky - they all post videos now, where is my good old article to read???

In the days when there were only three TV channels, no internet and disposable incomes were much lower than they are now, TV audiences were enormous and TV executives could put on virtually anything and still get people to watch. There were lots of documentaries on all sorts of subjects in the 1970s. They covered a lot of ground because they wasted no time telling us what they were going to cover, doing a recap every few minutes and then summing up at the end. Drives me to distraction when modern documentary makers do this.

This infuriates me too! I want to read the news, not watch a clip.

There is a lot of research stating that intelligence is largely hereditary.

More intelligent people tend to be better educated, at least in developed world where school education is mandatory and uni education is widely available.

In the last several decades in developed world people tend to have children with their intellectual and educational equivalents.

More educated people tend to have less children.

So even without tech impact the pool of intelligence genes is shrinking and being outnumbered by "rednecks".

You add SM and babies brought up by ipads and here we are

You're right - intelligence quota is generally an inherited trait. They reckon skewed to the mother's side. However, we are in the main a very samey bunch with a narrow median range of intelligence that the vast majority of us fall under. There are extremes at either end - geniuses and those with varying degrees of learning difficulty.

You're wrong that more intelligent people tend to be better educated. In fact, richer babies tend to end up better educated, with more opportunities in life to learn and excel. The number one factor impacting a baby's life chances is not how bright they are, but how well off their family is. It is remarkable how accurately wealth at birth tracks onto later academic, career and financial success. That's not a baby's intelligence at play - it's the chances money and privilege has presented to them.

You refer to 'rednecks'. In the UK we say 'chavs', implying that these people are simply intellectually inferior. They are not. Some will be geniuses, some will have learning difficulties. The VAST majority will have that same very average intelligence most of us possess. They just don't get the life chances to develop it. So your eugenics-flavoured argument falls. We are not being taken over and outnumbered by these populations with substandard 'redneck' brains.

We are losing our critical thinking skills though. That much is clear.

That's interesting. In the 1970's I was doing A levels. My A level English Lit teacher was also a form mistress for a class of 11 year olds. One day she came into our English lesson looking totally fed up. Basically she said she had had it up to her neck with her form. She said each September it took her the whole of the first term to get her new form to sit down focus and listen....seriously they had to be taught to stay seated in their chairs and not get up and wander around the room when they felt like it or to just talk to each other when they felt like it. These were not the "illiterate children of the redneck population", This was a direct grant maintained grammar school.

I’m definitely not.

It’s a bit of a pad snobbery. If they were sat there with a colouring book / reading book nobody would care.

I am saying the data disagrees with you. The more educated have fewer children.

You said they have more.