How dumb are we?

[Skybird]

You measure general education by totals of grades...?

You can have many academics in a room, and still the same room crowded with idiots.

In Germany we have the phenomenon of schoold notes becoming better, while more and more kids are less educated, can't read or write correctly after school. That is because the better notes are politically demanded - by lowering the standards: same note for more errors, better notes for same ammount of errors in school papers.

I thought we were talking education here on a more than just formal basis.

I only knew many, vceryx many people who stumbled through their university study courses, and while being able to parrot book knowledge lbindly like telephonme recorders, they had been perfectly trained to not creatively, independently think on their own. Such people are not able to form critical, questioning opinions of their own.

Information is not just information. The way you give and present it, already filters the options you have in using it, inevitably. The tools you work with, tailor and design the way you raise further information - so that these tools can calculate and compute them. By sticking to these tools, you mislearn to raise data and information of standards that these tools cannot handle.

Nowhere is this more true than in our interaction with computers and Windows! Windows is perfectly training us to work and think in certain ways that Windows lkes and can compute, while others it cannot, and we do not get encouraged to try these alternatives.

Behavioural shaping, and cognitive and intellectual shaping as well.

A growing number of children and juveniles in Germany cannot explain the origins and purpose of Christmas, and do not know who - like them or not - famous names of contemporary politics or history have been. They do not know what SPD means and who Goethe was, but they know the top three of the jingle charts for sure. Extreme weakness in correct grammar and spelling as well as extreme deficits in basic mathematics are so widespread that companies and employers need to train young people in growing numbers before they can start to train them in the job they have entered. Retraining them in logarithmics and basic statistics, is one thing, for nthat bstuff already is quite specific, I had to retrain that at the very beginning of my studying, too, since I was weak at that at school. But if people cannot handwrite a single sentence in their mother tongue without three errors in it, do not know who Helmut Kohl was, and are unable to make a simple division or multiplication or substraction with pencil and paper and without calculator, then I would say this is reason for deepest worries and concerns.

We have a growing number of academ,ics, buit the general standard of academic capability nevertheless seems to decline. Also, we have more and more "Fachidioten" - specialists that are unable to look beyond the very specific tunnelview of theirs.

Add to this a very different thing - the disease of widespreading opinion confomrity, as well as the pressure of poltiical correctness limitjuing even further what is not only allowed to do, but even what is allowed to be talked about, even what is allowed to be thought about. Add the media mainstream, the selfcensorship and widespread uniformity of the press. Add internet "news", and the increase of sites spreading news but the quality becoming more and more shallow, and the sources copying each other unchecked more and more.

We seem to have access to more information than ever, yes. But we are just the most misinformed and manipulated public ever, me thinks. The hope was that internet would brung us ten instead of just three sources for news, and this would make us better educated. Instead we are tried to become manipulated three times as intense than before, it seems to me. Or we get turned stupid three times as intense than before.

Most symbolical is the decline of TV and newspaper news. More and more it has turned away from trying to present objective information that they have researched as best as they could, and especially the TV news turned into an entertainment format bristling with quick cuts, colours, fast changing scenes, jingles and exciting - so they think - short spots. It is tailored to prevent people hitting thre button, the quota dominates the wuality of the information and seriousness, and the same stuff gets hammered home again and again and again and again. People ability to digest complex, indepoth infromation that way gets reduced, and their awareness span declines. And that now is a real and really threatening deficit.

All these things together are one of the main reasons why I am pessimistic about the omnipotence of democracy. We indeed get entertained to death - intellectual death. Switching on the TV is like pushing the button for the electric chair, with your brain stripped onto it.