were we just stupider back then?
remember back in the day when we had to walk up hill barefoot in the snow before coming home to watch captain planet? or how we had to labor in the fields for hours until we could come in and play with our super nintendo?
well I do. and I also remember thinking we did some pretty sophisticated stuff in school. my sixth grade science expo was a study of steam engines. my favorite book in middle school was the phantom tollbooth. in high school, I learned how to spell "tomorrow" (not "tommorow" or "tommorrow", despite what you may think) without having to think about it for a few minutes.
I also remember reading jon krakauer's "into the wild" my junior year in high school. it blew my mind. in some ways, it still does. I'm not as romantic as I was then, which makes me kind of sad, but it still stirs up some serious emotion when I read or think about it. I remember reading it at my own pace -- disregarding my teacher's requirements, understanding that he was assigning us to read it so we could read it. and I wanted to read it. so I did. in fact, I asked him if I could read at my pace, which I did -- sometimes ahead of the class, sometimes behind.
anyway. my super awesome cool (and apparently genius) sister is in junior high right now. and she's reading it. and I bet she'll get just as much out of it as I did (if she wants to), and she's several years younger than I was.
meanwhile, my cousin is a junior in high school. and he just got some weird nuclear physics thing, where someone is paying him to learn nuclear physics. what?! I thought my model steam engine was pretty cool.
so I ask: was I just stupider then? or are kids just smarter these days?
comments:
Though actually unrelated, you sort of seem to be asking about the Flynn Effect. That's the thing where IQ scores are rising. From some perspectives, kids actually are smarter these days.
You might be interested in Malcolm Gladwell's article that discusses the phenomenon: http://www.gladwell.com/2007/2007_12_17_c_iq.html
Poppy | May 28 @ 1:02am
wow, poppy, that's actually a really interesting article. but i think you're right to say "from some perspectives". i'm no expert on the topic, but based on that article alone, it seemed like IQs are rising merely because the test scores are going up. while i assume IQs are going up as a whole, it seems odd to hear the numbers they mentioned at how fast they were rising.
i personally have always just thought of that test as a fun little game, the same way you can take a test on humanmetrics.com to see "how gay you are" or "how much of a man/woman you are".
my prime example of this, the ability to take tests rather than the test to actually test your knowledge, i found after being in china for a while. in china, schools don't at all emphasize interaction. it's beyond being just a lecture. no one talks. i met a guy once who had studied english for over ten years. he was reading novels i read, and understood puns and jokes and so forth. i asked him, verbally, what his name was (and i like to think i speak clearly when i want to), and he had no idea what i asked him. he didn't know how to say a word in english. but he aced all his tests with flying colors. of course, that's not to say he's not good at english. but my point is only that his tests were enough to make him pass; in a different place -- say, america, or CC -- those tests would have gotten him booted from the school.
one thing i liked about the article you lined to was that flynn understood that the IQ test was just a test, not fool proof, and that it was "interesting" to study the results. but he seemed to understand pretty clearly that the test was changing by not changing (does that make sense? my IQ is apparently really low, so it may not).
either way, thanks for a good read! really!
THE Lowly Peon | May 28 @ 7:56am
sidenote/correction: abby is reading into thin air. sorry for the confusion
THE Lowly Peon | May 28 @ 7:57am
I know, right? I'm a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell.
Poppy | May 31 @ 10:58pm