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A more likely cause for these results is that there has been an effort in the last decades to dumb down education at every level. Not necessarily in order to l
by DominikR 10y ago
A more likely cause for these results is that there has been an effort in the last decades to dumb down education at every level.
Not necessarily in order to lower the average level of education but to battle perceived unfairness or racism within education.
The underlying assumption is that if you find that some minority or group is not represented equally in any area of education then it is a sign that there must be institutionalized racism involved.
This process is still ongoing to this day, currently everyone is focusing on STEM fields and asking the question: Why do so few women choose to enter these fields?
You can bet that the quality of education you are going to get in 20 years in these fields will be worse in order to attract women to fields that they are generally less interested in. (if Mathematics is the reason for that then they will simply remove it or reduce it significantly)
Edit: It is by the way more likely that changes in the education system (of which there have been plenty) cause different results in education than attributing it to something like contraception.
- jsmith0295 10y agoNot sure why people feel a need to downvote things they don't agree with, but I think this might somewhat be on the right track. It seems weird to attribute this change to something outside of the education system when there have been plenty of changes within it.
- lucozade 10y ago> Not sure why people feel a need to downvote things they don't agree with That could be the reason. Or it could be that this article is referring to an increase in pre-school readiness in poor children. It makes clear that there was no drop in readiness of rich children over the same period. Therefore the chances of this effect being due to some form of educational dumbing down doesn't make much sense. Now the authors of the article it's based on believe that the effect is likely due to improvements in parental education pre-school and that that may be, at least partially, due to government campaigns. I that sense it is conceivable (excuse the pun) to attribute it to the education system but not in the way the GP is suggesting.
- DominikR 10y agoMy point was that the educational system has been tweaked to be easier for everyone across the board. Children that previously performed better still perform well, children that performed worse now perform better than before. I'm not rejecting that contraception could be a reason, it's just that you have to show convincing evidence for it. The more counter intuitive your theory is the more evidence you need to produce. Imagine I declared that all of this is correlating with the size of Big Mac menus and has nothing to do with changes in the educational system. It wouldn't be unreasonable for you to question my theory, especially if I do not provide any evidence. > Not sure why people feel a need to downvote things they don't agree with I have no problem with that. If I'm just regurgitating what everyone is already believing then my comments would be pointless. I happen to have a different opinion and I know that for some this is offending. (but thats really their problem, not mine)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Noseshine 10y agoI did not vote in this particular case, but the downvotes probably are related to the complete lack of evidence included among the many claims? For an example using your own post, you write "plenty of changes". What changes? Links? You may or may not be right. Even if you are, most readers are just that, readers, not experts in the specific field. So one should include link to supporting evidence no matter how obvious it seems to oneself.
- wtbob 10y agoSo rather than the lower classes being raised up, the upper classes have been dragged down? That makes a lot of sense, and accords with what I've seen first-hand.
- Matachines 10y agofwiw my alma mater removed the math requirement for CS to make it "more accessible" to people
- DominikR 10y agoI'm in Austria so I don't know every detail about the US educational system, but I can give you some examples of what is going on here. To get a spot as a student in most universities you have to take a test first and only the best are selected. What they found was that there were comparatively fewer women passing the test for medical schools. So they removed many questions that were about logic or knowledge and replaced them with pictures of faces where the student has to read the emotion. (for example: is the person angry or happy?) The reasoning is that physicians need to be empathic towards their patients. It worked and now there are more female than male students passing this test. If I was female I would be deeply insulted by this. They literally believe that women are too stupid for logic related tasks so lets have them answer questions where they have to read emotions from faces.
- marchenko 10y agothe article specifically addressed this objection and rejected it.