To think people are getting noticeably stupider

[CurdinHenry]

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

Yes. I asked them to find something specific about the Kaiser. They all sat there, blankly. "What page?".
When they handed in their first essay, one girl's contained completely irrelevant information. I spoke to her after the lesson, "why did you write about the USA? I've given you the Specification, we're not studying that"
"That's what came up"
"Came up where?"
"When I googled the essay title".

Same here. But that wasn’t my point .

What was it then?

That people are making judgement on the lives of others they see in a restaurant (using screens) but it’s only a small snapshot of their lives . They may have been interacting all day, the iPad on the restaurant may be a treat. None of us knows .

I know I have outmoded ideas, but to me it’s disgraceful that any qualified primary teacher should be writing should of/could of.
Which autocorrect just tried to correct at least twice!!

I’m ancient and held the human race in higher esteem before the internet. Now it’s exposed in all its bigoted stupidity. Illiterate and prejudiced, what an eye opener!

Nah. I'm sure every generation throughout time has thought people were getting stupider. We don't know what the average person's level of intelligence or critical thinking was in the past.

Only if you listen to people who vote reform or read the daily fail

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER I agree, it's awful.

Apparently in WW1 the power that be had to give soldiers reading and writing lessons because the level of literacy was so low.

These were people destined for the trenches, not NCOs or officers. Just cannon fodder.

Which doesnt mean they were unintelligent, but critical thinking is a skill that has to be taught for most people. "Compare and contrast" or "outline the causes of ....." is very difficult to do if your literacy level means you're struggling to read train station signs.

But there were a couple of generations where illiterate people saw their children learning to read and write and realised that their children had more intellectual skills than they did. Now it's reversing.

I'm nearly sixty. I can tell you categorically, that stupid people have always been around -in spades. You just haven't noticed it.

That was my dad’s role when he did his National Service in the early 1950s.

Yes, my daughter's primary school teacher would often use the wrong YOUR and YOU'RE 😳

They're, there, and their.

When my daughter dumped her boyfriend one of the reasons was that he didn’t know the difference between the three.

I should have been proud that grammar is important to her but later that day she sent me a message with your instead of you’re!

🤣

😂

Yes it’s noticeable . What was normal to know a few years ago seems completly gone . My teen step kids don’t even know the world capitals it’s like they have been dumbified .
I have never seen so much information at our fingertips ( literally ) and so little intelligence and knowledge.
Both my young kids that are school age have to have extra classes at home for stuff as geography and history makes nil sense

I think the world is a different place. You don’t need to memorise loads of stuff but just have an awareness and understand where to find the information and interrogate the information to ensure it is correct

thats not to say learning poems off by heart and times tables aren’t necessary as they give different skills but you don’t need to know who Louis XIV wife was off the top of your head.

general knowledge seems to be pretty poor across the age range as well anyway

My daughter used to work as a school librarian. She said that many of the pupils (secondary age) found the very concept of a classification system difficult to grasp. Very different from searching online, I suppose.

EmanRTM on Youtube, despair guaranteed

Do you think it's because we read more, general knowledge was taught more - not so strict a curriculum - and we had to physically go to a library for instance to look things up? Daft example but if I'm watching something on the telly and recognise an actor, all I have to do is pause the telly and Google them, whereas before the internet we couldn't pause the telly but would remember later that we had seen them before and ask people?

I think there’s something to that. I am and always have been a big reader and I have very good vocab and general knowledge

but my DS was also a big reader but mainly internet based now - his general knowledge is phenomenal

Do you have a reasonable argument to back this? Or is it just some people dont share your opinions, and are therefore stupid?

Actually I think the thread title is wrong and should be ‘stupid has become more noticeable’

in the internet age videos and posts that are stupid are disproportionately liked and viewed but the proportion of the population who are ‘stupid’ probably hasn’t changed. Just amplified more