To think people are getting noticeably stupider

[CurdinHenry]

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

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.

There is a room for debate about root cause though. Baby's life chances are certainly impacted by family wealth, but we're talking about intelligence and education here. More intelligent people tend to do better and have more income which in turn leads to more wealth. If you take 100 surgeons and 100 manual warehouse workers the average IQ and income of the first group will certainly be much higher than of the second. If you take two builders, one highly intelligent and one is only so so, the former is likely to end up building own customer base, own business and much higher income; the less intelligent one will still earn but being an employee with 100k++ difference between two. I'm talking stats obviously.

You refer to 'rednecks'. In the UK we say 'chavs', implying that these people are simply intellectually inferior.
I simply quoted PP.

...yep...like Boris Johnson, Elon Musk...err, wait....NO !

You definitely are.

don't you see the difference between reading a book or colouring and ipad???

you couldn't prove OP's point any better

Something needs to be done. Maybe we should introduce a licensing system to be able to have babies. Everyone is allowed to have one and then the more educated and successful can have two or even three.

too late to edit - I'm not sure I can agree with you about a child reading a book or colouring during meal time either. It's a time to communicate

Family wealth has MORE of an impact than neonatal intelligence. Born rich, stay rich. Born poor, stay poor. Born average, stay average. That's my point.

Of your 100 surgeons and 100 manual workers... yes, you need a degree of above average intelligence to become a surgeon. And, of 10,000 upper middle class, privileged kids, maybe those 100 surgeons were the ones that had that intelligence. But of the manual workers, if you took them and slotted them in with 10,000 of THIER working class peers, what number would also have that requisite above average intelligence? I'd say 100. They just don't get the chance. We're equally bright across class divides but some people don't get the same chances as others.

I think people are quick to assume that poor or disadvantaged people are a bit thick, and therefore they deserve the status they have. It's simply not true. Maybe not well read, or educated, or engaged, or cultivated, or even politicicised... because the chances never come for some. But not dim. Just ordinary human minds.

I am a professional with two degrees. I don't kid myself that I have a special intelligence that 'rednecks' do not. I am very average and I had good opportunities, starting with a full bookcase in my home and disposable income in my mum's pocket. That's it.

I doubt it would have been just some schools deciding spelling wasn't important, the trend that I encountered in the late 1960s when I started teacher training was that any form of rote learning was wrong, spelling, times tables being among the losers. There have been great strides in the last 20 years to reverse this potty policy but it does mean that a couple of generations have never been taught times tables, basic grammar, spelling etc.. I recall an excellent young teacher in my Maths department in the early 2000s being genuinely surprised to learn that 'would of' is wrong!

that's REALLY interesting given my post about what my Eng. Lit teacher said about 11 year olds in the early 70's. She was form teacher for the new intake year and she said it took her a whole term to get her new class to sit down, stop talking and focus.

I really don't think this was it. My grandparents did plenty of leisure and other activities. Reading, charitable work, leading scouts, helping at the school, being in a dinner club, my grandma was a union organiser and brought meals to shut ins. Reading real books, the theatre.

I did state it with a huge assertion as a second language speaker... and was thankfully corrected 😉
Nigel would be proud of you though...

Since using ai at work to write reports my brain is definitely less engaged. Click click click, work is done compared to when I had to really think about what I was writing, having to focus and compose a paragraph etc.

Time saving but brain destroying.

The standard of questions on both University Challenge and Mastermind does seem to be lower now though!

Since posting that it has occured to me that there are some exceptions to the rule, words ending in 'consonant y' being one of them, in the same way that they don't follow the general rule about plurals, obviously 'consonant y' words are just plain awkward! Words ending 'vowel y' mostly toe the line, coy, coyer, coyest, they also know how to pluralise themselves,eg boy, boys.

Educating someone needs positive input from 3 sources, the learner, the teacher and, in the case of a child, the parent(s). All too often the parents couldn't care less so the child uses this as an excuse to not bother to engage in the learning process and, more importantly, prevent other more motivated pupils from learning. Faced with sheer apathy I had no problem telling them 'I get paid the same whether you do this work or not', and then direct my attention to the vast majority who want to learn. My time was far too valuable to be wasted.

This OP likes a random thread

Social media but in particular short form video (Instagram and TikTok reels) has a real impact. We can say we have autonomy but it is very difficult to resist trillion dollar technology with teams of human psychologists behind it working to get us hooked.

I will admit that in the past month I’ve been struggling to read a book. I used to read avidly but all I keep thinking about is my phone. I’ve just bought a ‘dumb’ phone

a child colour in or reading is learning the skill of concentration and delayed gratification that an iPad doesn’t give them. But agree with pp meal times should be a lot engaging in conversation

and if your kids are at a stage where behaving in a restaurant isn’t possible well here’s a novel idea - you don’t go!

I don't watch Mastermind but wouldn't say this is true of University Challenge. Possibly those of us who read a bit and like trivia and quizzes accumulate more knowledge as we get older and find some of the questions a little easier.

Oh yes, and someone said there was nothing like Only Connect on TV in the UK decades ago. Possibly not, but Round Britain Quiz on Radio 4 was a very tough quiz which also involved figuring out obscure connections and assumed a high standard of general knowledge and familiarity with the Bible and the classics of English literature. Not sure if it's still on these days.

Very true. A child colouring in is also deploying fine motor skills. As already mentioned on this thread, there's a new campaign pointing out that children spending a lot of time on screens at school as well as at home are not doing their eyesight any favours as well as losing out on opportunities to develop gross and fine motor skills, social skills and spoken language.

While plenty of threads on here do seem to support your theory, I think a lot of it is actually bot/AI/troll farms, so probably not people who have real life experiences or education.

I can't speak for other languages but in British English, there are ALWAYS exceptions to the rule....none of which exceptions can change "happy" into a s single syllable word.
one of my favourite ever quotes.
"The purity of the English language
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary.
James Nicoll (b. 1961), "The King's English", rec.arts.sf-lovers, 15 May 1990"

I’m inclined to agree. I remember something called ‘ Public information films’ that included such gems as ‘ don’t leave your child alone, playing next to a road’, ‘don’t climb electricity pylons’ and the inexplicable’ don’t polish a floor and put a rug on it’. I’m guessing they were needed, so, yes.

Eventually, I realised that the problem was that the care agency had given them a postcode which was out by one letter, and rather than seeking the road in an A-Z or similar, they were completely bamboozled.

Young people don't seem to get maps at all. I recently had to explain to 2 nieces, both in their early 20s and with good academic qualifications, how to use the index in a road atlas. They were astonished, and found the concept of dividing a map into squares with a reference number quite incredible.

One of them has made the journey from her home to her grandparents, some 70 miles away, several times, but still has no idea how to get there. She always uses google maps on her phone, but it sends her different ways according to traffic and she has no real concept of where it is. She was astonished to see that my house isn't far from at least two of the possible routes, because she hasn't really got a clue where they take her.

Learning how to read an OS map and navigate by it was possibly one of the most useful things I learned at school.