http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190709-has-humanity-reached-peak-intelligence
After nearly a century of steady increases in IQ scores, the last couple of decades has seen a plateau and slight decrease. Although IQ does not necessarily correlate with wisdom, people have significantly higher scores than a century ago. Fairly long article but author speculates on the lack of critical thinking skills being taught may have something to do with the plateau. Another suggested that the widespread use of calculators has reduced manual math capabilities somewhat in the general population which is part of the IQ calculation.
Critical thinking is an educators' buzz word these days. In philosophy we were teaching it (and advocating its place in the core curriculum) before it was cool to talk about.
ReplyDeleteI was just thinking about the human "computers" who did the calculations that got the astronauts into space and safely back (and who happen also to have been African-American women)... could we find those people today?
Not that spelling prowess is any measure of intelligence, but isn't it "dumber"?
DeleteI am apparently exhibit A in this “dumming” down trend. Must be from too much soccer and not enough baseball.
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