(10-23-2015 09:24 AM)Handsome Creepy Eel Wrote: iknowexactly, the idea that people are actually becoming more intelligent is not a foregone conclusion. But even if it were, surely you as someone from an academic background must be aware of the tremendous amount of corruption and distortion going on there. I have a family member who is a professor who has published dozens of peer-reviewed papers in influential journals and know very well that most of the success in that field is achieved by political and networking work rather than actual research.
IQ definitely has improved over time in the West around 2-3 points per decade.
Personally I think that superior food, clean water, better pregnancy nutrition, more stimulation during childhood - was mostly responsible for that. We somehow seem to be forgetting that most folk in the Western world up until the 1920s or 1940s even lived terrible lives of poverty and destitution. The WWI recruits in the UK on average grew about 3 inches, because those young men tasted meat almost every day for the first time in their lives. In 1914 there was still child labor in Europe as well as in the US!
But what the report does not mention is that the IQ is tanking since the mid and late 1990s in many Western countries.
Fact is that the African continent and the Muslim world almost as a whole did not progress in term of IQ advancements. The post on birth defects concerns IQ just the same, because most sub-optimal birth complications do not manifest via defects, but simply via lower IQ, weaker immune system, weaker physical body, greater mental instability. Thus all those claims by the backwards British Pakistanis that "everything is fine with them" is just bollocks.
We increasingly find ourselves in a world where 70-85 IQ folk live with 110-120 IQ folk and not even decades of growth will be able to breach that gap.
Thus the results of the current drop in Swedish PISA tests:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/ju...-education
Quote:'It's a political failure': how Sweden's celebrated schools system fell into crisis
Quote:Sweden: Pisa performance
PISA Scores from 2000 to 2012
![[Image: sweden_schools_pisa-2-0-0.png]](http://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2015/06/sweden_schools_pisa/giv-21277jKDGnCXf4866/img/sweden_schools_pisa-2-0-0.png)
Definite drop.
Quote:Pupil performance
Average merit rating in year 9
Girls | Boys | Total
![[Image: sweden_schools_pupils-2-0-0.png]](http://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2015/06/sweden_schools_pupils/giv-21277W7PuWut48UwW/img/sweden_schools_pupils-2-0-0.png)
Notice the major discrepancy between boys and girls despite the fact that boys are 5% smarter and their aptitude for learning is by far greater. The feminized anti-male school system is to blame for that crap.
Also I don't know that the internal merit rating means in Sweden since the results are tanking - maybe how to be a good brainwashed citizen.
Of course the article is pure mainstream bullshitting tip-toeing around the issue. Here what one director for a successful private school had to say:
Quote:She says the decline in Sweden’s schools has nothing to do with the introduction of free choice or the emergence of independent schools. Hamilton quotes research by the IFAU, the Swedish Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, which suggests that results had started to drop even before the changes. “The free schools are not the cause,” she says.
The drop in results had nothing to with the legal changes, which essentially paid everyone any kind of education. I can bet that the successful private schools have simply rigorous tests and don't take in any migrant kid who is not up to standard.
We know from schools in Germany as well as in the US that unruly school behaviors of some students then carry on to others as high-performers even get persecuted by school bullies. When pupils take pride in doing nothing, not passing tests, not being able to read, then what results can you achieve? Mogadishu - here we are coming. Stupid citizens are good citizens as the elite needs ever less of them for actual work.