by russell
This year's SAT scores are the lowest in 10 years.
What's up with the kids? What's up with the schools? What happened to school reform?
Are the SAT's even relevant? Do they test anything useful? Does the decline and/or stagnation of the scores tell us that we're becoming more ignorant, or are they being taken by a broader spectrum (i.e., not just hopefully-college-bound) of kids?
I have no answers, or even hypotheses. It struck me as a maybe-important data point, so I thought I'd put it up for discussion.
For fun and further question asking and maybe answering, here is the Nationmaster education page
In case anybody wants to see how we stack up internationally.
Hope we're not getting stupid.
The PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) that happens every 3 years is the one that often gets mentioned here when there is discussion of international comparisons.
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/
Here’s a gem from the Guardian’s discussion of the results
Students in Shanghai performed so well in maths that the OECD report compares their scoring to the equivalent of nearly three years of schooling above most OECD countries.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/03/pisa-results-country-best-reading-maths-science
HOwever, Diana Ravitch provides a balancing view
http://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/03/my-view-of-the-pisa-scores/
Sampling error in experiment design.
In the past, mostly well-qualified students on their way to four-year colleges took the SAT. The students who were unlikely to do well on the test mostly didn’t take it.
Now, a much greater percentage of high-school students take the SAT.
A more significant comparison would be the top-decile scores of today’s students to the top-decile scores of yesteryear’s.
SAT scores are normed, so does a year-to-year comparison mean anything? It’s like complaining that the average student is below average.
It’s just sun spots.
The one variable which somehow seems ot get lost in the shuffle with SAT scores is the change (massive, since I took them) in the number of kids who expect to go to college. And, therefore, in the number of kids taking the SAT.
Once, maybe the top 20%** of the high school seniors in the state would take them. Today, you’re looking at maybe the top 50%. Even assuming that the tests are as hard, but no harder, than they were before, you’d expect scores to drop. If we didn’t see scores dropping, you’d have to think that they were making the test easier — maybe even specifically to keep the scores from dropping.
** Feel free to supply accurate numbers of the 1960s (and now). In my high school (and it was the only high school in a rural/suburban public school district), upwards of 98% of graduating seniors were in college, or junior college, the next year. Every year. No more pressure than there is on 8th graders to be in high school the next year; it was just the way things were. But it makes it hard to judge what the norm elsewhere was.
wj, another possible difference is that several decades ago you didn’t need an SAT score to get into many state universities, certainly not juco. I don’t know today. 98% is a pretty impressive number btw. The charter schools in my hometown didn’t approach 98.
More proof that the teachers unions and public education system in this country should be dismantled and handed over to market-based educators deriving motivation from the invisible hand of corporal punishment and PROFIT!
Also, isn’t this an annual hand wringing in the U.S. about school kids here “falling behind” their international peers that has gone on for, what, 40 years now? Longer? Was the US ever #1 on these international measures of student achievement?
In your face, Lithuania!
This could account for much.
Once upon a time, kids in school took the IAT or other achievement test every few years. It’d be good if these tests continued to be administered, as a spot check and not as a requisite for grade advancement (as has been implemented in Florida) and not as a commentary on the performance of specific teachers or schools.
So: standardized testing as a means of monitoring absolute performance of the student population at large, together with any needed adjustments when the testing materials change.
That’s my half-assed idea.
My kid, by the way, took the SAT in 8th grade. She did pretty well. I think she was in the upper ten percentile of college-bound kids. But she’s not the average kid; not by a long shot.
In many ways, actually.
Kevin Drum mentioned recently that standardized test scores seem to be improving rapidly in the primary and middle-school grades, but not in high school. What that means, if anything, I don’t know. I’m still suspicious of making comparisons over time on normed tests, unless you’re very sure of how the norms and the tests are themselves varying.
When I lived in Arizona, we took the “Californias” every year. In New Jersey, we took the “Iowas.” It was one day out of the year we spent filling in little circles with our #2 pencils. My recollection is that there was no noticeable difference between those two tests.
My kids take several standardized tests throughout the year, which are referred to by inscrutable acronyms, and the results of which are even more inscrutable reports.
(Not that it really has anything to do with the SAT, or at least not anything that occurs to me right now.)
I’d like to point out that the SAT is, objectively, an easier test than it used to be. To adjust my score to a score that would be meaningful on today’s scale, I’d have to add 50 points to the total. Last I looked, that was true.
I would suggest, instead, that the test be made more difficult. Using the methodology of my freshman physics prof: if you make the average score 50% of the possible points, you don’t have the bell curve squashed against one end of the scale or the other.
She makes one error in her article: that Jeb’s crusade to reform education failed.
Based on one data point: that Florida students are only average.
This would be an accurate conclusion to make, provided that there were scores prior to 1998 that showed Florida students at the same or higher level, within margin of error.
But there is in fact data that shows that in some areas, Florida children are doing significantly better than they were. Whether you can credit Jeb’s educational reform measures with that or not is not a discussion I am prepared to go into, and it’s not really my point. My point is more this: you can’t form a conclusion about rate of advance/decline from one data point.
Unless you’re an aeronautics engineer.
Engineering jokes. Ar ar!
Fun stuff. Since Carter’s creation of the DOE (and Federal take-over of American public schools), we’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High Schools – to requiring remedial English in colleges – where observers now note, ‘The average college freshman now reads at a 6th to 7th grade level’…
Not to put too fine a point on it – but currently your kids would stand a better chance at ‘becoming educated’ if simply locked in a library a dozen years. The ‘administrative class’ has flat-out jumped the educational shark. Check out a few Youtube videos of high school ‘graduates’ trying to discuss civics…
98% is a pretty impressive number btw.
So I have discovered, Marty. In fact, some friends who are teachers tell me it is impossibly impressive. But I’ve also talked to folks I know who went thru a year or two before and after I did, and it really was that way.
In my graduating class of 250, exactly two people were not in college (or junior college) the next year. One was mentally retarded (whatever the current term is). The other managed to get his girl-friend pregnant, and therefore necessarily married her and got a job to support his wife and child. (Yes, it really was that long ago.)
The town has grown a lot (5,000 to 45,000), and changed a lot, in half a century. But still today, “Danville’s public schools are rated some of the best in California, with 98% of its high school graduates attending colleges and technical schools.” Some traditions seem quite resistant to change — not that anyone would want them to.
you can’t form a conclusion about rate of advance/decline from one data point.
Unless you’re an aeronautics engineer.
But other fields don’t have the Navier-Stokes equation to explain everything. 😉
Federal take-over of American public schools
Somehow we missed this here in North Carolina. Including our state legislature, which is doing its own best to screw the NC school system, not realizing that they are a mere puppet theater to distract us from Our Federal Overlords.
we’ve gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High Schools – to requiring remedial English in colleges – where observers now note, ‘The average college freshman now reads at a 6th to 7th grade level’…
Ah yes, I did put my Latin lessons to good use…wait, no I didn’t. I’ve never actually used my high school latin for anything.
Now the Calculus AB I took, I used. (My son, same public school district took AB and BC — Cal I and II).
Funny. In the “good old days” of Greek and Latin they rarely taught Calculus. Today they teach a year further into the college math curriculum than they did when I attended. Sadly my awful, federally run school (news to the teachers there, but who are they to argue? They don’t teach Latin or Greek!) only teaches up to two three semesters of college level English, only two of history, and one of social studies, economics, and computer science.
The less said about their dual credit classes the better, as that’s an even BIGGER failure! I mean good lord, sending kids over to the nearby community college to take college classes for dual college and high school credit?
My Latin-speaking forefathers would be ASHAMED of such a federal disaster!
In my graduating class of 250, exactly two people were not in college (or junior college) the next year.
Yes, impressive compared to the average. During the 60’s approx. 50% of graduates went on to enroll in college.
But then, Danville, CA is pretty well off.
Also, isn’t this an annual hand wringing in the U.S. about school kids here “falling behind” their international peers that has gone on for, what, 40 years now? Longer?
I guess maybe since May 17, 1954.
Speaking as a potential future teacher of Latin, I can see with my own eyes how the quality has declined there. And over here the federal government has exactly zero authority over education (it’s 100% under the states that could do a far better job coordinating their educational efforts absent a federal standard).
But the beginnig of that decline concerning Latin has been dated to 1900 (when the Latin essay got dropped from the curriculum). Books written/compiled then for grammar schools are now used at the university level (yes, unchanged reprints in Gothic letters). Maybe a bit out of date as far as common use of language is concerned but still superior to anything that came after (only the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which is a wee bit more modern, is considered to be an equal to those old German tomes).
What use is Latin? I’d say the primary effect is that kids that have learned Latin still have a better sense of language in general than those that have not, i.e. it makes them better in their German mother tongue. Living languages typically taught at school seem to lack that effect (I’d love to see a long term experiment with Icelandic, a language that feels like a crossover of Latin and German structurewise and is as ‘useless’ for most people). Classical Greek is a different matter. Although it is clearly a ‘better’ language than Latin, it is also imo too complex for starters. Latin is primitive enough to be suitable for the common schoolkid as first language).
Having studied chemistry I also observed that those students that had a basic education in Latin and Greek had it easier at least in the beginning while those that had not, struggled with the terminology.
Danville, CA is pretty well off.
Danville’s well off now. Then, it was just a little farm town starting to become a suburb; not particularly well off compared to anywhere around. The only anomaly came from the fact that it was halfway between Berkeley and Livermore, so a bunch of the physicists who worked at both UC and Lawrence Livermore (or the “Radiation Lab” as it was called then) lived here so they could commute either way. But that was not really a significant part of the population.
I never thought the teachers I had, with a few truly exceptional exceptions, were particularly committed or knowledgeable. My son graduated from a pretty fair public school system and was in the AP program. He had really outstanding teachers. My daughter graduated from a private HS. Her teachers were also quite impressive. I agree that the better schools do a better job than in the good old days. The one thing I found disappointing, however, was that neither of my kids ever took a geography course.
wj,
248 out of 250 is simply off the charts, so something else was going on….
I suspect the offspring of those pointy headed commuting intellectuals had a lot to do with it 🙂
Gives a whole new meaning to the term “bedroom community”.
I seem to recall getting taught geography, although I don’t recall if it had a seperate class or not. But one of the great weaknesses in our education system IMHO is how massively ignorant we all manage to stay regarding the rest of the world.
We know a little (mostly bad things, and mostly pretty distorted) about the places we have major military activities in. We (generally) know almost nothing about anywhere else. In fact, there is a stunningly large portion of the population which isn’t even clear that Canada is a seperate country. The mind boggles.
The one thing I found disappointing, however, was that neither of my kids ever took a geography course.
It gets covered over a number of years in history classes and social studies.
Geography, in general, is just rote memorization. Pretty much everyone has broken it up into ‘learn the relevant geography when you learn the relevant history’.
Especially since, other than basic map usage, geography is by and large useless outside of history or current events for the K-12 crowd. Knowing how the geography of a given country causes certain stresses (water availability, land fertility, etc) or how it contributed to political conflict, etc is quite pertinent to knowing why things unfolded as they did — or why certain issues are critical today.
But the ability to recall the capital of New Zealand or locate an obscure place on a map? We have better maps than anyone has ever had, right in our pockets. Accurate down to the foot and updated daily. If those stop working, the capital of New Zealand is not exactly going to be important given the chaos we’d be dealing with right here.
A separate class for it is a waste of time. Sure, it’s nostalgic for those of us who had it — but nostalgia is a terrible curriculum guide.
Bobby, I think it really was a local sub-culture thing. As I mentioned, it wasn’t like there was a noticable amount of pressure to go to college. It was simply what one did. Education was a “good thing” and everybody went for it. If you were going to be a rancher, you went to UC Davis (at the time, the “agricultural school” of the University of California), but everybody went.
It wasn’t really about this being a particularly intelligent group of kids. Certainly when I got to college I saw a lot more and brighter kids than in high school. But the attitude towards school among those college kids was also a lot different, and not in a positive direction. The interest in actually learning something had dropped substantially — I didn’t see anything like the attitude I grew up around until I hid grad school. Culture.
What use is Latin? I’d say the primary effect is that kids that have learned Latin still have a better sense of language in general than those that have not
i only took a year of French, but that “sense of language in general” is the biggest thing i took from it.
today, i can speak about as much French as i learned in the first three weeks of that class. but it completely changed the way i thought about similarities and differences between languages, origins of words, how parts of speech work, etc.. just completely eye-opening. i’ve been fascinated by all that stuff ever since.
i wish i would’ve stuck with the French, because i’m sure there’s a lot more of that ‘sense of language’ to be had.
Cleek, that’s exactly what I got out of 4 years of high school German. I couldn’t speak it today, but it gave me a huge insight into how languages in general work.
Hartmut,
my first foreign language was English. It is a supremely useful language but it is for human languages the same as Basic for programming: You learn an awful amount of sloppy habits with it. Essentially, learning grammar is just rote memorization of exceptions.
My third foreign language was German, and I daresay that it is a very useful language for learning to think grammatically. The preciseness of the German grammar is simply beautiful. It is almost like math.
Anyhow, the important thing is to learn several foreign languages. As the proverb says, “Wer fremde Sprache nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen.”
I did 6 years of Latin, and 2 years of Ancient Greek (because convinced by a cool young Classics teacher that Greek was in every way better than Latin). My years of Greek were agony, and I concur with Hartmut’s opinion that it’s too difficult for beginners, because pretty much every f**king verb or noun is irregular. It was a miracle I passed the public exams in it. Contrary to received opinion in conventional English society at the time, I found my classical languages more or less useless in later life UNTIL I tried to learn Italian. Suddenly, the combination of my decent French, with Latin, kicked in and made the acquisition of another romance language much easier than for my fellow students. It’s all a long time ago, and I can hardly remember any Latin, and no Greek, but I remember the experience of learning Italian with pleasure, and although I didn’t pursue it for very long, I’m still able to do a reasonable job of translating from the written. Nowadays, the English are notorious for not learning foreign languages – it’s a great shame.
i only took a year of French, but that “sense of language in general” is the biggest thing i took from it.
As I understand brain development, you also got an improved neural architecture that makes learning languages later in life easier.
I’m honestly not sure Latin counts (you don’t speak it, for the most part, or even converse — just translate and read it) — but learning a foreign language before your brain finishes development wires up a bunch of rather useful connections in case you ever wish to learn another, even after your brain has finished development and settled down.
One of my favorite classes in high school was “Etymology”. It was taught by the second-most soporific teacher I have ever had. I literally fell asleep in class more than once. He was from the Classics Department, where he taught Latin and Ancient Greek. Maybe he was livelier over there.
In any case, the subject fascinated me — in the sense that it kept my interest ever afterward — partly because, modern Greek being my “native” language and ancient Greek being the source of so much of the English lexicon, I keep coming across interesting connections and coincidences.
At one point, long after high school, I began to have fun with the etymology of words in modern Greek which are obvious imports from other languages that few Greeks are aware of. My current quest is to find modern Greek words that were imported from other languages which originally imported them from ancient Greek in the first place.
–TP
One of the things that I always remembered from reading Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography was his description of the conventional wisdom of the time that learning Latin was useful preparation for learning other Romance languages. He said something to the effect that it was like hoisting yourself up a set of stairs so you could walk down them instead of up. The point being that walking up the stairs would still be easier than the hoisting, and that learning living languages like French, Italian and Spanish, derived from Latin, would be the way to prepare for learning a dead language like Latin, rather than the other way around.
I’m interested in learning Interlingua, either as a substitute for learning multiple Romance languages or as a foundation for learning any of them. I took Spanish and a bit of Latin in high school, and I can already comprehend about 80%, maybe more, of what I’ve tried to read in Interlingua.
One of my French teachers in high school was a great enthusiast for Esperanto, but I’ve never heard of Interlingua before. I’ve just looked it up on Wikipedia. Fascinating. I found the first sample almost completely comprehensible, maybe 90-95%, which I assume is partly because I still have some French/Latin/Italian.
Italian is easy for English speakers to pick up informally: think of an english word for something, then think of *another* english word for it. The second is probably close to the Italian word.
The first one is likely to be German/Saxon based; the second latin/french based.
That also works for learning Unix commands, except that after thinking of the second word you remove all the vowels.
Ahh, roman script based languages. I wish I had realized that my facility with languages was really a facility with languages that use a Roman alphabet. I did French, Latin and Greek at uni, did a year in France and then went to Spain, and then went to Japan. After 5 years, my Japanese was pretty good, so when I went to grad school, I took 3 years of Thai. Came back to Japan and after 3 years, any knowledge of Thai that relied on written forms was absolutely and totally gone. Did 10 days of research in Vietnam and then went back 5 or so years later and found I could still remember a helluva lot of Vietnamese. On the other hand, my multiple attempts to study Chinese have been a total waste of time, cause everything has to pass through some sort of Japanese processing before I can even attempt to reach in and pull out the right word. And yes, I’ve tried learning it via pinyin, but it’s the reinforcement of words and phrases that seems to be important.
I still read a bit about Homer and the ancient Greeks, but it is like reading about sports rather than being able to actually play…
My impression from watching Asian dramas is that Korean is a better language than Chinese for yelling a people. 🙂
When we moved to Hong Kong we were told (by other cynical expats) that it was impossible to whisper in Cantonese. Not true, but a nice way of trying to comprehend the din. I’ll pit Cantonese against Korean in a shouting match any day.
On reflection, I think you’re right. At least in regard to Hong Kong. Jackie Chan for example. I guess I was think about Taiwanese. Some of the female voices are so high pitched as to tickle your eardrums.
Personally I found Latin easier at school than English because the approach to the former was analytical while the latter was about ‘putting words into the air’ on the spot and trying to decode aural input even more quickly. Especially the latter is the greatest hurdle for me still with living foreign languages apart from English. When I left school my English was negligible. I took up reading books in English at the university for two reasons: 1) English chemistry textbooks came at about half the price of their German editions/translations (even if the author was German) 2) it took me about 3 times the time to read a novel in English, so books lasted longer (otherwise my budget ran out far before the month was over). Reading thousands of pages (and acquiring a very thick dictionary) was the key to improving my skill, not talking.
My experience with Icelandic is a mixed bag. I would compare it to having to speak Latin as a living language with the trapfalls of German added on top. Now I can truly appreciate why German is so difficult to learn in particular for native English speakers. In addition there are tons of good Latin dictionaries and grammar books but very little on Icelandic. And what use is a dictionary that does not give info on the cases a preposition rules in what context (Icelandic has many that rule different cases and have a different meaning based on that) and then notoriously uses examples that this cannot be deduced from?
@Morat20
Your opinion on Geography is maybe a little bit harsh – modern Geography as an academic subject has little to do with memorising the world’s capitals or such things. That’s what maps, databases and the internet is for. Instead, it is a very useful connective link between such disparate subjects like sociology, economic history, soil science, geology, climatology, geomorphology and general history to answer the question of why does the surface of the earth look like it does now, including both the natural world and human influence. Which may be a very fascinating and absorbing subject. I did something akin to a master’s in Geography, although I am currently working as a technician at a dendrochronological lab under the umbrella of a geography departement at a German university. People there, in cooperation with other institutions from all over the world, study things like the reconstruction of the Asian summer monsoon strength using stable isotopes of tree rings, Soils as proxies of the history of landscape and environmental fluctuations, non-volcanic andic soils, the Monitoring snow and ice surfaces on King George Island (Antarctic Peninsula) with high-resolution TerraSAR-X time series, effect of AIDS prevention campaigns in South Africa, Spatial Develpment in Luxembourg: Mimetic evolution or emergence of a new planning culture? (don’t ask me – not my world), and a lot of other things.
(Sorry for the rant – you hit my pet peeve, Geography as “Scattergories”, memorising only).
Over here, there is a lot of caterwauling whenever PISA results are published by state – Bavaria, usually among the winners, is crowing how great their schools are, without regarding the much more difficult demographics town-states like Bremen, Hamburg and Berlin face. If all those politicians would spend an equal amount of time to find solutions to the really pressing problems – e.g. far too many kids leave mandatory schooling at 18 without a Hauptschulabschluss (akin to high school diploma), that would be really useful.
You want yelling, hit a dim sum restaurant in Hong Kong, or maybe anywhere.
Or Woody Allen’s parents’ dinner table.
Or my paternal grandparent’s Thanksgiving celebration with second cousin Anna and husband Earl and all of the aunts and uncles and cousins in attendance and me maybe thinking I should politely raise the subject of FDR’s New Deal or maybe choose that time to break the news that my high school girlfriend was Catholic.
All amiable in the end, but the decibel levels scared all the cats and the birds went silent in the yard.
The best call and answer high decibel dinner table argument I’ve ever witnessed, outside of a Spencer Tracy/Katherine Hepburn movie, ended with my Aunt, in her 80’s, bringing up my Uncle’s — in his mid-80’s — reluctance to have much fun at a swanky dinner party they went to 20 YEARS EARLIER and shouting at him “YOU USED TO BE EXCITING!!!” and he, at the far other end of the table, answering, without missing a beat, “And, YOU USED TO BE EXCITABLE!” at which point my cousin, their oldest son, slammed down his cutlery and said “ALRIGHT!”
It was like Ali-Frazier.
I think they rehearsed that argument several times over the years.
Death, that bastard, has silenced most of that entire wonderful crowd of amazing personalities.
My world is much quieter now, which is why yell at all of you.
Buffalo Bill ’s
defunct
who used to
ride a watersmooth-silver
stallion
and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
Jesus
he was a handsome man
and what i want to know is
how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death
e.e.
Is our children worthy, geographically speaking?:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/09/following-in-her-mothers-snowshoes.html
I think I’ve located the statistical rumpus pulling the SAT scores down.
Sorry, I can’t help it, but this family is being talked about — again, stupefying as it is — as the future inhabitants of the Vice President’s quarters on the ground of the Naval Observatory.
Now I can truly appreciate why German is so difficult to learn in particular for native English speakers.
Actually, the worst problem that I (as a native speaker of English) had with learning German was that every bloody noun has a gender. I could deal with the verbs varying a lot with tense. I could deal with the amazingly (to an English speaker) long compound nouns. But gender? Totally mystifying. (I would doubtless have had the same problem learning any of the Romance Languages, had I taken them.)
It may be why, in spite of having to learn a whole new set of symbols (two of them, actually, plus kanji), Japanese seemed somewhat easier. No gender hassles.
wj, I think an especially nasty part of German (and Icelandic) is the weak and strong declension of adjectives depending on whether the noun it relates to has the indefinite or definite article (or a pronoun*) attached to it (ein großer Mann vs. der große Mann, ein kleines Kind vs. das kleine Kind).
Latin has no articles at all, so that is not a problem there (Greek has but not the weak/strong declension for adjectives).
*here too different pronouns have different effect: dieses kleine Kind vs. mein kleines Kind.
Personal experience is not in evidence, but anecdata suggests an emphasis change to teaching for the test. The problem with that is, if you don’t specifically teach the exact test problems, the learners are not learning alternatives and optional methods that may help with unorthodox questions on the test itself.
I think they used to call it “cramming”, and sometimes it works. Other times, you get unrecognizable problems on the test that might as well be in ancient Greek for all the use they are.
So I am not surprised that kids are failing and flailing on these tests. We are focusing on the tests instead of the learning. We get what we deserve.
In 1975, I took the SAT, and did just well enough to get into one of the “lesser” University of California campuses. (The bar wasn’t as high then.) In 1992 I took the GRE, which is basically the SAT repackaged slightly for people wanting to go to graduate school. I scored at or above the 92nd percentile in all categories. Had I become brilliant somehow between 1975 and 1992? No. I had learned how to cram well, and I crammed… not useful knowledge, but knowledge on how to take a timed multiple-choice test. Over the course of a month, my accuracy on sample tests tripled and my test time halved.
That experience led me to believe that standardized tests primarily evaluate the ability to take the test well. Yeah, I needed a decent vocabulary, I needed basic math competency, and I needed some skill at puzzling out logic problems. But without all that cramming, I would have done poorly on the test.
Once I got into a Master’s program, multiple-choice tests just didn’t happen. I was expected to explain myself in reasonable English in paragraphs, essays, term papers, posters, oral presentations, and ultimately a thesis. The GRE was a circus without benefit.
Karen, I think the “term of art” in the testing world for what you experienced is “test sophisticated.”
It’s especially prevalent in multiple choice tests.** You learn that, for example, it is worthwhile to guess when you can reduce the possible correct answers to 2 out of the original 5 options — even if they take points off for wrong answers (vs. just leaving the question blank).
** I suspect that’s why some people’s measured IQ goes up over time. Practice does help.
So, yet another instance of long established, accepted, believed stuff being revealed as just a lot of made up crapola.
Like the law.
I fully expect one day to be a passenger on an airliner flying at 30,000 feet and an announcement coming over the intercom that aviation engineers have found a glitch in the equations that have explained the notions of lift and thrust from the time of the Wright Brothers, and everything we have believed about the fact of flying is just a misunderstanding, a grift, a belief in unreality, and as I and my fellow passengers chug our drinks, the plane I’m on and every other plane aloft in the world at that moment will fall to earth like so many grand pianos.
Even the birds will look at each other while in flight, shrug, and buy the farm beak first.
Can we cancel gravity too?