a report came out yesterday from professor james flynn that the average iq of british 14 year old children has reduced by 6 points in the last 20 years, or as the newpaper put it, CHILDREN ARE BECOMING DUMBER.
my first thought was that if this trend continues, i'll be able to fund my retirement by selling buildings i don't technically own to young people.
naturally, there has been some discussion over this. most people do believe that kids are beoming dumber-this includes stories about how one person needed a calculator to figure out how much change to give for a fifteen dollar bill from a twenty, listening to rap and so on.
there have also been a number of theories as to why the iqs have been dropping; the two most common being the modern politically correct education system which bans winners and losers and the rise of welfarisim (aka dumb people having dumb children)
interestingly, most people commenting noted that their children were bright enough but were being let down by other (presumably poorer) children
flynn himself, according to the newspaper article, blames youth culture, playstation and television. however, when you dig down what he actually says is that tv etc has replaced imaginative play.
the idea that imagination is related to intellegence makes sense. after all, an iq is just a number, its what you do with it that counts
anyone can learn and regurgitate facts, but the people who can move from "what is" to "what could be" will be innovators and geniuses of the future.
i'm not going to bad mouth tv, i watch a lot of it, after all, but i have to admit that the shows that spoon feed you far outweigh gthe shows that ask you to think for yourself, or spark a train of thought.
if tv and video games are part of the problem, so to is the tendency by some parents to keep their children safe from everything. . yes,its understandable-it is a dangerous world, but in the ability to explore, or to theorise about the world around them can only benefit children in the long term. real life will become mundane soon enough-why not imagine that that house on the corner is haunted or that unicorns live in the forest.
for a chilling (and occasionally funny) view of the future, may i point you in the direction of "idiocracy", a movie made by mike judge of king of the hill and office space fame. luke wilson plays a soldier who is sent by time machine into the future where, thanks to a long regime of anti-intellectualisim, the world is populated by morons
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This is such an interesting finding and one I'm going to file away for future teaching use. I'd treat it sceptically in the same way I'm sceptical about grade inflation (subsequent generations of children keep getting higher and higher marks). I'm also sceptical about the TV as blunting intelligence hypothesis (Sigman's been beating that drum for a few years) because it seems to rest on notions of passivity which I don't think are true - TV and movies only work because they engage the imagination. Think of the shower sequence in Psycho - without imagination you would be unable to conclude that that poor girl had been stabbed.
ReplyDeleteWhat interests me most of all is whether IQ actually measures anything that reflects performance 'out there' in the world. I'm reminded of a story from an educational psychologist who had visited a school for children with learning disabilities only to find they had managed to give the teacher the slip, get out of the locked school, find their way into town and enjoy a happy afternoon window shopping. When they had been rounded up and retunred to class, the ed. psych set about administering his IQ test - an assessment that used a maze-based test. Not one of the children could do it.