4 ms·

Another aspect of this issue is the apparent difference in intellectual preparedness of kids today. I think this is partly due to educational environment and pa

by wrp 4y ago

Another aspect of this issue is the apparent difference in intellectual preparedness of kids today. I think this is partly due to educational environment and partly a result of selection bias (in that accounts of the past focus on the "smart" kids). When I was a teenager, rummaging around the attic at grandma's house I stumbled upon my dad's old scientific stuff. I was shocked at the sophistication of what a high schooler did in the 1950s. For example, there were projects to build radio circuitry, with the expectation you would have a mathematical understanding of the function of every component. By my time in the 1970s, home electronics projects aimed at teenagers had devolved to "Stick this here, and that there, and connect the battery, and gee whiz isn't that neat!" He also did what would today be college level chem experiments, without aid or supervision. A batch of nitroglycerin was one of his less wise projects. I think it was memories of his own near-disasters that caused him to watch over me like a hawk during my own youthful experimenting. The level of ability and initiative in a high school student as shown in the movie October Sky (1999) was certainly not typical in the 1950s, but I think it was more common than modern experience would lead you to expect.

majormajor 4y ago
Actually-educational things for kids haven't gone away entirely, though they've certainly changed shape. There are a lot of kids and teenager related products around programming and microcontroller-related hobby projects that teach and require deeper understanding of the concepts. Building a radio, on the other hand, when AM/FM radio is now 90-100 years old instead of 20-30... that wouldn't interest me nearly as much anyway. At the extreme end of "kids today" (ok, ten years ago), you have Palmer Luckey building VR headsets. Does anyone have figures on what percentage of 1950s kids were using those sophisticated chemistry or radio kits?
- melony 4y ago
  The mathematics of radios are a lot more difficult than the basic boolean logic and discrete math for intro to programming. Radios and circuits are in differential equations territory. A thorough explanation of the RF concept of "ground" and transmission lines is impossible to do at the high school level without handwaving away most of the details.
  - majormajor 4y ago
    I'm not sure I follow. My father had a hobbyist radio kit in his youth, but he didn't understand all the details then. He later learned diffeq in college. It was and still is quite easy to build many already-discovered things without understanding them.
    - wrp 4y ago
      You are thinking of assembling pre-made kits. The math is for designing circuits from scratch.
  - wrp 4y ago
    > [things]...impossible to do at the high school level without handwaving away most of the details. Something about my dad's generation is that I observed them to be more ready to resort to workbench tinkering to get over patches where their math gave out. Following your point, maybe this results from their early experiences of aiming beyond their math capabilities.
  - QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
    I may be showing my filter bubble, but what fraction of highschoolers get to first order systems of linear differential equations? We heavily covered them in BC calc but I guess I don't know if that's the curriculum or my teacher going the extra mile
    - jerf 4y ago
      I covered them in high school, but in isolation. I think it'd have to be a dedicated high school program explicitly built to cover differential equations and tie them back to physics and then also get far enough into EM for that to be the way you can teach about radios. Not even remotely all high school students could handle that and I think even in an accelerated program you'd have to consciously be sacrificing something else to get there, e.g., organic chemistry or something. There's only so much time. I mean, even in college, the physics I took that did EM with full, undiluted multivariable calculus was considered the accelerated/advanced track. "Normal" EM worked with a lot less math. I'm sure the 1950s kids were indeed learning handwaving approximations. That's not a criticism. You can get a long way on good handwaving approximations.
- wrp 4y ago
  Something to help appreciate the relation of science to youth culture in the 1950s is the popularity of sci-fi movies. Aside from rare exceptions like Destination Moon (1950), 1950s sci-fi was produced with no pedagogic intent. Studios churned out these movies because science (okay, sci-fi) was what attracted the teen market. In the 1960s, teen tastes shifted to horror and the film studios followed. If you are interested in 1950s American sci-fi cinema, the comprehensive survey is Bill Warren's Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2016).
- kragen 4y ago
  aside from the question of novelty, i think i can buy a pocket am/fm radio for us$6 today https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-917855935-radio-portatil-ditron-am-fm-parlante-bolsillo-vintage-antena-_JM https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-917855935-radio-por... so building a radio from scratch doesn't have the same cachet it had in the 01950s when a radio was a major household appliance people would save up for you can definitely kit-build an am or fm radio from a kit without any understanding of the concepts, the radioshack '200-in-1' 'science fair' kit had wiring netlists for both am and fm radios, and didn't really explain the concepts. similarly you can solder together a microcontroller board and write circuitpython on it without any understanding of the concepts in any of these cases there are a shitload of concepts to learn i don't know much about chemistry but i think you have measurement error, valence electrons, vacuum filtration, density, oxidation states, precipitation, ph, solubility, activity, decantation, density, enthalpy, recrystallization, pressure, solubility product, never give an acid a drink, entropy, flasks bubbling over, gibbs free energy, hplc, equilibrium, distillation, the arrhenius law, sublimation, ligands, spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, ... in analog electronics you have measurement error, voltage, current, energy, capacitance, resistance, complex impedance, inductance, frequency, power, charge, parasitics, exponential decay, diffeqs, linear time-invariant systems, lti system transfer functions, convolution, the fourier transform, filtering, and only then do you get into nonlinear systems: rectification, inductive kick, transistor action, transistor switches, the ebers-moll model, miller capacitance, schmitt triggers, oscillators, etc. iirc that's just the first two chapters of horowitz and hill and there are thirteen more chapters and sixteen appendices. to be fair some of them are digital in programming you have the whole programming iceberg at https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/ https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/. but even if you only get into the stuff that is actually involved in blinking an led on an esp32 as a microcontroller-related hobby project you have c, a compiler, a parser, context-free grammars, finite state machines, variables, lvalues vs. rvalues, subroutines, formal vs. actual parameters, arrays, hash tables, linked lists, pattern matching, optimizing transformations, denotational semantics, undefined behavior, structs, rtl, assembly language, machine code, symbol tables, linkers, register machines, propositional logic, de morgan's theorem, synchronous logic, metastable flip-flop states when crossing clock domains, jtag, debuggers, ram, flash, tcp/ip (tcp ip arp routing checksums ethernet), wi-fi, direct-sequence spread-spectrum communication, ofdm, shannon's theorem, csma/ca vs. csma/cd, pwm, etc there's a shitload to learn but you can do stuff without knowing more than a tiny amount of it
watwut 4y ago
It is not like average teenager understood those in 1950 however. And it is not even the case that kids today were less educated either. You have today individual kids doing leetcode on pretty high level. You have then doing a lot of stuff, but it is different stuff. Meanwhile radio and circuits are not cool anymore nor new anymore. Comparably less people is even interested.
- wrp 4y ago
  > ...it is not even the case that kids today were less educated either. This claim could be supported or contradicted by evidence. Do you have any? My experience is not K-12 education, but at the college level, standardized measures such as the GRE show declining levels of ability over the decades. A given score today doesn't mean the same as 40 years ago, because the test has needed to be recalibrated for a lower average performance.
  - whatwherewhy 4y ago
    Lower average could mean just that much more people have access to (higher) education now.
    - wrp 4y ago
      You are correct. It is generally believed that the large increase in percentage of students going to college is a major contributing factor in the decline of average performance. I have read reports claiming that secondary education at the very high end has retained its quality, but I haven't looked into that myself. So, it may be plausible to claim that while the average level of performance has declined, there is still the same population of high achievers in absolute numbers. I would be interested if somebody knows a good reference on that.
  - watwut 4y ago
    High school drop out rates were 27.2% in 1960. This is one third of students not even finishing high school. Meanwhile college enrolment rates were miniscule compared to today. Yet also, getting into top university requires way more effort then it used to in 1950-1960. > standardized measures such as the GRE show declining levels of ability over the decades. A given score today doesn't mean the same as 40 years ago, because the test has needed to be recalibrated for a lower average performance. Are they incomparable or they show regress? The data dont show consistend decline in years where it did not changes, but there are massive drops in scores when the test was recalibrated. It also shows multiple whole new topics being tested against 1960: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_327.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_327.10.a...
Aunche 4y ago
> By my time in the 1970s, home electronics projects aimed at teenagers had devolved to "Stick this here, and that there, and connect the battery, and gee whiz isn't that neat!" I'm much younger than you, but that wasn't my experience at all. My dad got me this kit [1] when I was in fifth grade, and it was great. I got completely lost when it talked about transistors, but the projects were still fun (considering my videogame time was limited) and in retrospect the instructions were very well written. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Elenco-EP-50-Electronic-Playground-50-in-One/dp/B00000IUD2/ref=pd_lpo_1?pd_rd_w=A4bIr&content-id=amzn1.sym.116f529c-aa4d-4763-b2b6-4d614ec7dc00&pf_rd_p=116f529c-aa4d-4763-b2b6-4d614ec7dc00&pf_rd_r=V5EBADM4NRH3Z40RJSSM&pd_rd_wg=c2dn1&pd_rd_r=2d2faa56-51ea-4692-81f1-f2c7fd00f904&pd_rd_i=B00000IUD2&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/Elenco-EP-50-Electronic-Playground-50...
- wrp 4y ago
  Perhaps I was being overly dismissive, but that's the kind of thing I had in mind. You have a small set of components and a limited set of illustrative circuits to make by laying in wires. The older projects I referred to involved designing circuits for practically usable equipment. So it was a much higher order of difficulty. By the way, I had similar things as a kid and loved them. I don't mean to trample on anyone's fond memories.
- MarkusWandel 4y ago
  Is that the one with the good manual? Most of these spring clip electronics sets come with pretty crappy manuals, very light on theory and with uninspired circuits (i.e. in "130 in 1" there are maybe 10 good circuits and endless variations of those). Whereas an Elenco brand kit I found at the thrift store came with a fantastic manual, that taught electronics right from the basics, using the kit's components to illustrate as it went.
  - ansible 4y ago
    Yeah, I faced that issue as well. I had three kits, IIRC: 1. Radio Shack crystal radio. That was relatively simple, but I don't think the manual explained how it worked too well. 2. Radio Shack 10-in-1 Jr Electronic Lab Kit. I don't recall how good the manual was, but I didn't really learn much from that. 3. Some unknown brand 150-in-1 kit. IIRC that basically just had circuit diagrams, and didn't really explain anything.
pasquinelli 4y ago
i've always had the impression that a high school diploma meant a lot more back then. hard to say if high school education has been lowered to match the lesser value of a diploma, or if the esteem a diploma commands has dropped with lowered standards. i wonder what forces are at play to cause that change.
agumonkey 4y ago
I'm very sad (physically so) when I run into these things. Another anecdata: - found an old junior high school math book: they had lessons on finances, taxes, maybe compounding interests. All in simple terms, no mathematical proofs or analysis. Still very useful long term knowledge. - someone on reddit posted pictures of his grand father's notebook. Biology lecture notes about plants. It was utterly beautiful, drawings and writing, superb regularity, density .. Saying it looked like a product wouldn't be exaggerating a lot. And now your comment got me to think that this seem to be a worldwide trend, not even a nation-wide education system degradation. That's super odd.

by wrp 4y ago

majormajor 4y ago

Actually-educational things for kids haven't gone away entirely, though they've certainly changed shape. There are a lot of kids and teenager related products around programming and microcontroller-related hobby projects that teach and require deeper understanding of the concepts. Building a radio, on the other hand, when AM/FM radio is now 90-100 years old instead of 20-30... that wouldn't interest me nearly as much anyway. At the extreme end of "kids today" (ok, ten years ago), you have Palmer Luckey building VR headsets. Does anyone have figures on what percentage of 1950s kids were using those sophisticated chemistry or radio kits?

melony 4y ago
The mathematics of radios are a lot more difficult than the basic boolean logic and discrete math for intro to programming. Radios and circuits are in differential equations territory. A thorough explanation of the RF concept of "ground" and transmission lines is impossible to do at the high school level without handwaving away most of the details.
- majormajor 4y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. My father had a hobbyist radio kit in his youth, but he didn't understand all the details then. He later learned diffeq in college. It was and still is quite easy to build many already-discovered things without understanding them.
  - wrp 4y ago
    You are thinking of assembling pre-made kits. The math is for designing circuits from scratch.
- wrp 4y ago
  > [things]...impossible to do at the high school level without handwaving away most of the details. Something about my dad's generation is that I observed them to be more ready to resort to workbench tinkering to get over patches where their math gave out. Following your point, maybe this results from their early experiences of aiming beyond their math capabilities.
- QuadmasterXLII 4y ago
  I may be showing my filter bubble, but what fraction of highschoolers get to first order systems of linear differential equations? We heavily covered them in BC calc but I guess I don't know if that's the curriculum or my teacher going the extra mile
  - jerf 4y ago
    I covered them in high school, but in isolation. I think it'd have to be a dedicated high school program explicitly built to cover differential equations and tie them back to physics and then also get far enough into EM for that to be the way you can teach about radios. Not even remotely all high school students could handle that and I think even in an accelerated program you'd have to consciously be sacrificing something else to get there, e.g., organic chemistry or something. There's only so much time. I mean, even in college, the physics I took that did EM with full, undiluted multivariable calculus was considered the accelerated/advanced track. "Normal" EM worked with a lot less math. I'm sure the 1950s kids were indeed learning handwaving approximations. That's not a criticism. You can get a long way on good handwaving approximations.
wrp 4y ago
Something to help appreciate the relation of science to youth culture in the 1950s is the popularity of sci-fi movies. Aside from rare exceptions like Destination Moon (1950), 1950s sci-fi was produced with no pedagogic intent. Studios churned out these movies because science (okay, sci-fi) was what attracted the teen market. In the 1960s, teen tastes shifted to horror and the film studios followed. If you are interested in 1950s American sci-fi cinema, the comprehensive survey is Bill Warren's Keep Watching the Skies!: American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties (2016).
kragen 4y ago
aside from the question of novelty, i think i can buy a pocket am/fm radio for us$6 today https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-917855935-radio-portatil-ditron-am-fm-parlante-bolsillo-vintage-antena-_JM https://articulo.mercadolibre.com.ar/MLA-917855935-radio-por... so building a radio from scratch doesn't have the same cachet it had in the 01950s when a radio was a major household appliance people would save up for you can definitely kit-build an am or fm radio from a kit without any understanding of the concepts, the radioshack '200-in-1' 'science fair' kit had wiring netlists for both am and fm radios, and didn't really explain the concepts. similarly you can solder together a microcontroller board and write circuitpython on it without any understanding of the concepts in any of these cases there are a shitload of concepts to learn i don't know much about chemistry but i think you have measurement error, valence electrons, vacuum filtration, density, oxidation states, precipitation, ph, solubility, activity, decantation, density, enthalpy, recrystallization, pressure, solubility product, never give an acid a drink, entropy, flasks bubbling over, gibbs free energy, hplc, equilibrium, distillation, the arrhenius law, sublimation, ligands, spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, ... in analog electronics you have measurement error, voltage, current, energy, capacitance, resistance, complex impedance, inductance, frequency, power, charge, parasitics, exponential decay, diffeqs, linear time-invariant systems, lti system transfer functions, convolution, the fourier transform, filtering, and only then do you get into nonlinear systems: rectification, inductive kick, transistor action, transistor switches, the ebers-moll model, miller capacitance, schmitt triggers, oscillators, etc. iirc that's just the first two chapters of horowitz and hill and there are thirteen more chapters and sixteen appendices. to be fair some of them are digital in programming you have the whole programming iceberg at https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/ https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/. but even if you only get into the stuff that is actually involved in blinking an led on an esp32 as a microcontroller-related hobby project you have c, a compiler, a parser, context-free grammars, finite state machines, variables, lvalues vs. rvalues, subroutines, formal vs. actual parameters, arrays, hash tables, linked lists, pattern matching, optimizing transformations, denotational semantics, undefined behavior, structs, rtl, assembly language, machine code, symbol tables, linkers, register machines, propositional logic, de morgan's theorem, synchronous logic, metastable flip-flop states when crossing clock domains, jtag, debuggers, ram, flash, tcp/ip (tcp ip arp routing checksums ethernet), wi-fi, direct-sequence spread-spectrum communication, ofdm, shannon's theorem, csma/ca vs. csma/cd, pwm, etc there's a shitload to learn but you can do stuff without knowing more than a tiny amount of it

watwut 4y ago

It is not like average teenager understood those in 1950 however. And it is not even the case that kids today were less educated either. You have today individual kids doing leetcode on pretty high level. You have then doing a lot of stuff, but it is different stuff. Meanwhile radio and circuits are not cool anymore nor new anymore. Comparably less people is even interested.

wrp 4y ago
> ...it is not even the case that kids today were less educated either. This claim could be supported or contradicted by evidence. Do you have any? My experience is not K-12 education, but at the college level, standardized measures such as the GRE show declining levels of ability over the decades. A given score today doesn't mean the same as 40 years ago, because the test has needed to be recalibrated for a lower average performance.
- whatwherewhy 4y ago
  Lower average could mean just that much more people have access to (higher) education now.
  - wrp 4y ago
    You are correct. It is generally believed that the large increase in percentage of students going to college is a major contributing factor in the decline of average performance. I have read reports claiming that secondary education at the very high end has retained its quality, but I haven't looked into that myself. So, it may be plausible to claim that while the average level of performance has declined, there is still the same population of high achievers in absolute numbers. I would be interested if somebody knows a good reference on that.
- watwut 4y ago
  High school drop out rates were 27.2% in 1960. This is one third of students not even finishing high school. Meanwhile college enrolment rates were miniscule compared to today. Yet also, getting into top university requires way more effort then it used to in 1950-1960. > standardized measures such as the GRE show declining levels of ability over the decades. A given score today doesn't mean the same as 40 years ago, because the test has needed to be recalibrated for a lower average performance. Are they incomparable or they show regress? The data dont show consistend decline in years where it did not changes, but there are massive drops in scores when the test was recalibrated. It also shows multiple whole new topics being tested against 1960: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_327.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_327.10.a...

Aunche 4y ago

> By my time in the 1970s, home electronics projects aimed at teenagers had devolved to "Stick this here, and that there, and connect the battery, and gee whiz isn't that neat!" I'm much younger than you, but that wasn't my experience at all. My dad got me this kit [1] when I was in fifth grade, and it was great. I got completely lost when it talked about transistors, but the projects were still fun (considering my videogame time was limited) and in retrospect the instructions were very well written. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Elenco-EP-50-Electronic-Playground-50-in-One/dp/B00000IUD2/ref=pd_lpo_1?pd_rd_w=A4bIr&content-id=amzn1.sym.116f529c-aa4d-4763-b2b6-4d614ec7dc00&pf_rd_p=116f529c-aa4d-4763-b2b6-4d614ec7dc00&pf_rd_r=V5EBADM4NRH3Z40RJSSM&pd_rd_wg=c2dn1&pd_rd_r=2d2faa56-51ea-4692-81f1-f2c7fd00f904&pd_rd_i=B00000IUD2&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/Elenco-EP-50-Electronic-Playground-50...

wrp 4y ago
Perhaps I was being overly dismissive, but that's the kind of thing I had in mind. You have a small set of components and a limited set of illustrative circuits to make by laying in wires. The older projects I referred to involved designing circuits for practically usable equipment. So it was a much higher order of difficulty. By the way, I had similar things as a kid and loved them. I don't mean to trample on anyone's fond memories.
MarkusWandel 4y ago
Is that the one with the good manual? Most of these spring clip electronics sets come with pretty crappy manuals, very light on theory and with uninspired circuits (i.e. in "130 in 1" there are maybe 10 good circuits and endless variations of those). Whereas an Elenco brand kit I found at the thrift store came with a fantastic manual, that taught electronics right from the basics, using the kit's components to illustrate as it went.
- ansible 4y ago
  Yeah, I faced that issue as well. I had three kits, IIRC: 1. Radio Shack crystal radio. That was relatively simple, but I don't think the manual explained how it worked too well. 2. Radio Shack 10-in-1 Jr Electronic Lab Kit. I don't recall how good the manual was, but I didn't really learn much from that. 3. Some unknown brand 150-in-1 kit. IIRC that basically just had circuit diagrams, and didn't really explain anything.

pasquinelli 4y ago

i've always had the impression that a high school diploma meant a lot more back then. hard to say if high school education has been lowered to match the lesser value of a diploma, or if the esteem a diploma commands has dropped with lowered standards. i wonder what forces are at play to cause that change.

agumonkey 4y ago

I'm very sad (physically so) when I run into these things. Another anecdata: - found an old junior high school math book: they had lessons on finances, taxes, maybe compounding interests. All in simple terms, no mathematical proofs or analysis. Still very useful long term knowledge. - someone on reddit posted pictures of his grand father's notebook. Biology lecture notes about plants. It was utterly beautiful, drawings and writing, superb regularity, density .. Saying it looked like a product wouldn't be exaggerating a lot. And now your comment got me to think that this seem to be a worldwide trend, not even a nation-wide education system degradation. That's super odd.