and in case anybody is wondering how other countries are doing
what confuses me about china here is that they only test 4 provinces.
i’d be interested in the result for the whole country
The system in China is fairly standardized, so I’d expect the results would be similar.
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I wouldn’t, what works in an overpopulated hellhole won’t work so well when you have less than a hundred students in the school
Given high social mobility in China, it appears that the education system does work consistently. Also, not sure what these overpopulated hellholes are.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/18/world/asia/china-social-mobility.html
Huh, I wonder what Singapore is doing different.
They just have an extremely competitive school system. The score does come with a cost.
Maybe, but does no one else have a competitive school system? That seems incomplete.
Singapore really is a special case in that regard. China dropping on the list is likely a healthy sign actually because it means less pressure on the kids.
Why is almost every country on that list worse than they used to be?
OECD being the always the same map states, a.k.a. the “free world,” a.k.a. “NATO and pals.”
Climate change, COVID, late stage capitalism, fascism, social media… The so-called polycrisis. It’s no wonder kids aren’t as enthusiastic about learning anymore. I wouldn’t be either.
The so-called polycrisis
It’s called capitalism.
It’s almost like moving to all remote learning for a couple years left kids behind educationally. I’m lucky to be old enough to be well out of schooling when the pandemic came around, but I can’t imagine having to go through high school remotely and having any sort of expectation for success.
This drop started in 2018 though?
There are no data points between 2018 and 2022. Having said that, looking at the more legible charts on page 57 of the full report (same content as the summary chart, just easier to read), it looks like:
- Science has been falling pretty steadily starting at the 2009-2012 cycle. No apparent covid effects.
- Reading and math both might have had a decline leading up to 2018 (I’d need someone to do actual statistics to know if it is statistically significant). However, they had a significantly bigger decline starting in the 2018-2022 cycle, and continuing into the 2022-2025 cycle.
Ah, NM then.
Not to mention the massive use of LLMs to do the homework and thinking for the student.
Grredy and right wing govs don’t want a good school system, they wouldn’t exist without ignorant and stupid people, they need obedient and ignorant minions.
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Without context for the numbers or their significance, this seems like another “AAH! Education Panic!” bit of discourse.
Pretty obvious the big hit happened during COVID and now we’re in a long hangover period. But absent more meat on the bone than “Number was 500 and now it’s 460”. What’s the useful takeaway from this information? Other than to just express more generic Doomerist sentiments in the comments? Hard to say.
Also might be worth asking, if the numbers had gone up instead of down, would anyone here be celebrating? Would it have even been posted? Case in point:
The Test-Optional Paradox: Why Published SAT Scores Keep Rising Even as Fewer Students Submit Them
Is this something we should be happy about or sad about?
the west is clearly collapsing, so yeah, we should be celebrating.
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Some institutions have been tracking general intelligence for ages (like the army) it’s been going down since the 1960s
I mean, if you’re talking about IQ, you’re misreading those statistics. It’s not the Intelligence that’s been going down. It’s the Quotient that’s been going up. The baseline (ie, IQ = 100) for intelligence is significantly higher today than it was sixty years ago. That’s in part due to improvements in health and nutrition, but also the end result of people running these tests so regularly that you can effectively study for them in advance.
how can you not think that the ruling elites want to have dumb heards of cattle which they can control?
I don’t think the “ruling elites” have any kind of consensus on what they want, as evidenced by the perpetual infighting culminating in outright violence aimed at one another. I don’t think these economic elites really have a grasp of what they’re trying to do. Half of them thought Jeffery Epstein was a genius based on an email correspondence that suggests he was barely literate. If Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Thiel, and Trump are any indication of how the average Ruling Elite operates, they’re thinking with their dicks half the time and with a nostril full of coke the other half.
That this fractious conglomerate of idiots, assholes, and fuckbois have a plan more sophisticated than “Steal Everything Not Nailed Down and trade it for Pedo-Coins” is not in evidence. A look into their (routinely poorly managed) interpersonal communications suggest that some of them think they’re doing EugenicsPlus super-intelligence breeding programs by getting THOTs on Twitter pregnant. Others want to put their brains on the computer to live forever. Still others think they can achieve world conquest by running a strat from HOI4 set on Medium difficulty.
If there’s an intelligence gap in this country, I would argue that it’s top down. The so-called Elites are the ones getting dumber faster than the rest of us.
They want to fuck and exploit you
So did the Cave Man. But we’re so far off from the 11-D Chess of Allen Dulles and Henry Kissinger, when it comes to socio-economic machinations. This is Charles VI / Henry VI territory. These people are drooling their way into the 21st century and we’re just getting dragged along behind them.
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IQ has plateaued or gone down for some western countries while continuing to rise elsewhere (shitty table copy but search for it in the link to read):
Country Peak Gain Period Reversal Detected? Approximate Reversal Date Source Basis Norway 1954–1995 Yes ~1995 Military conscript data Denmark 1959–1998 Yes ~1998 Military conscript data France 1949–1999 Yes ~1999 National assessment data United Kingdom 1950s–2000s Partial ~2000s Multiple study sources United States 1932–1990s Plateau ~1990s Normative restandardizations Netherlands 1952–1980s Unclear Debated Wechsler norm comparisons Kenya 1980s–2000s No
https://neurolaunch.com/rise-in-average-iq-scores-over-the-20th-century/
IQ has plateaued or gone down for some western countries while continuing to rise elsewhere
You’re describing the “Reverse Flynn Effect”, which is still hotly debated as happening at all much less happening to this day. And it’s got nothing to do with modern-day school performance listed in OP’s image. The Flynn Effect is more neatly tied to the Lead-Crime Hypothesis, having emerged in the 1990s and largely restricted itself to post-industrial nation states.
I was replying to you, and you were discussing IQ.
Also, not hotly debated, but more complicated: https://personality-project.org/revelle/publications/dworak.23.pdf
With context the report says that the decline predates covid
People quickly turn to explanations such as the impact of the COVID pandemic, but a decline in reading was already visible well before the pandemic hit. We cannot say for sure, but declining levels of reading for enjoyment and the shift towards digital reading – skimming social media feeds and rapidly processing information – may be compromising the ability of students to engage with complex texts and data.
Well… fuck
So the world did end in 2012?
13% of the world maybe
My favorite chart from this report is the one on page ~230ish where they show science benchmark test scores for students who use AI to study, and it basically just makes you perform much worse at any level (except one data point where the AI users perform only slightly worse). I’ve kept a few print outs of the page to hand out to the AI-pilled students I work with. In one of their words “wow. This is pretty damning”.
But what does this really mean? School is about developing critical thinking, regardless of whether you know every Shakespear madterpiece or whether you know how to resolve second order differetial equations. Cinese education surpassed western education years ago and they are now picking the fruits of that effort.
Yet, i think the real tragedy of western schooking and young people is social media. Its making our kids dumb any the are loosing their critical ability, ability to ask questions and find answers, ability to be curious. Yes, the western world is on a downward trend but it doesn’t have to be the end.
i see it as history repeating itself since various regions/areas/peoples of the east went through their own similar trends.
west asia – for example – was a bastion of philosophy, science and math during the dark ages, but went through an anti-intellectualism period that created the asia minor, levant, and gulf region we know today. the same w east asia as it went into its isolationist period in the 13/14th century.
if we’re lucky, this downward trend won’t have to last centuries like the 2 examples i’ve shared, but we should expect it since that’s how history keeps telling us that it will happen … again.
Maybe, but the starting point is not the same. Now, information travels superfast compared to centuries ago. Governments could keep up, … now they lag behind and keep up.
information does travel faster, but it’s more selective than ever – most americans aren’t even aware of the staggering amounts of propaganda they’re swallowing that is actively fostering this type of mass societal regression despite it being publicly available to them through things like the epstein files and the freedom of information act.
But don’t worry, we have AI now…
