The rot sets in...

[BobM]

There are some elegant comments in this thread, especially from Carl and Tor.

Critical thinking is not something that any government covets for its subjects. Hitler is oft quoted in this kind of discussion: "What good fortune for governments that the people do not think". That is about as true as a political statement can get. A hundred and fifty odd years ago one Horace Mann set out to bring public education under the umbrella of government for the express purpose of controlling what the common people would be allowed to know. Lincoln was aware of the problem when he pointed out that the philosophy in the classroom in one generation would be the philosophy of government in the next. The collective human memory is short, and is made shorter by the willful manipulation of educational content. Original thinking is rare, and is always recognized as a threat to the state that has to be watched carefully and suppressed when it is perceived to be a threat to the powers that be. One can liken the government schools to military boot camps whose goal is to turn out uniformly compliant and controllable troops. Think about it.

I have some small personal experience with authority clashes that date from my days as a graduate teaching assistant at Clemson University. It was explained to me in ways both blatant and subtle that the philosophy of the administration was not to be challenged in any way. Ever. That kids were being cheated out of what they were paying for was not a consideration.

The result of several score years of deliberately declining standards, being taught by carefully under educated "teachers" is plain to see. The Founders knew what kind of people were required for the Republic to prosper, and were plain in their writings on the subject. We no longer have even the pretense of being, as Madison put it, "a moral and religious people". What is accepted as moral is now based on consensus and subjective feelings, and the demigods in Washington have become the perceived source of all good things.

There were doubtless a good many people in Rome who were shocked when the city was sacked in AD 410. America is being socially and economically sacked right now even as soothing words of denial ooze out of both the media and seats of government.

[Jack Williams]

..and yet America is still looked upon as the touchstone of the world.

[Tor]

..and yet America is still looked upon as the touchstone of the world.

But for how much longer if the current trajectory holds course?

[dillon]

If you figure that a certain portion of the population are geniuses, and a slightly larger portion are idiots, and the center majority are apathetic somnambulists, then with a population of more than 300 million, the proportion of idiots is going to be more noticeable than in a smaller nation...

[dillon]

Plus I blame Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes for giving a megaphone to the idiot portion...

[Tor]

Perhaps - though I think the prevalence of genius is far greater than we see. Here is a quote from the end of the prologue of John Taylor Gatto's book Weapons of Mass Instruction, whose words I cannot better here:

After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

I will also note that as familiar an experience as having people be amazed at what I and others in my family have done is to me, I remain almost painfully aware that in a world without the school system of today we would almost certainly be only ordinary.

[crfriend]

After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

A fundamental problem with that thought is that sometimes, perhaps even most times, genius does not "self-start" and needs encouragement and nurturing to get going. Bright folks do well "managing themselves" once "up and running", but the bootstrap process (or that of getting a sustainable chain-reaction going) can be painful and sometimes fraught with grief. Being smart in a sea of dolts is a powerful de-motivator.

I will also note that as familiar an experience as having people be amazed at what I and others in my family have done is to me, I remain almost painfully aware that in a world without the school system of today we would almost certainly be only ordinary.

Schools are most useful, in my opinion, for basic socialization and imparting a set of basic, yet critical, tools; they teach the mechanics of what one will need in later life. That the typical teaching tactic fails to mention why the skills will be useful in the real world is where the system fails. Tools do not exist in a vacuum; they need context to be relevant. Likewise, without context, ideas can frequently be irrelevant.

[BobM]

Perhaps - though I think the prevalence of genius is far greater than we see. Here is a quote from the end of the prologue of John Taylor Gatto's book Weapons of Mass Instruction, whose words I cannot better here:

After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Depending upon which testing standard is used "genius" can be anywhere from 140 to 160+. The bell curve represents a normal distribution, and is symmetrical. Therefore in a large enough sample there will be just as many profoundly gifted people as there will be profoundly handicapped ones on the other end. Genius is not "common as dirt". It is vanishingly rare. I think what Mr. Gatto was trying to get at is that there are a lot of creative, intelligent, and inquisitive kids. There are, but there is no ocean of geniuses out there. Leaving really smart kids to their own devices is not a good idea. Yes, now and then one will jump out of the gate and lead going away, but not often. I have found that the smarter the kid the firmer the required hand until the kids' mental engine is running smoothly.

A fundamental problem with that thought is that sometimes, perhaps even most times, genius does not "self-start" and needs encouragement and nurturing to get going. Bright folks do well "managing themselves" once "up and running", but the bootstrap process (or that of getting a sustainable chain-reaction going) can be painful and sometimes fraught with grief. Being smart in a sea of dolts is a powerful de-motivator.

Bullseye. My personal experience is in that mold. I was reading Ovid and C.S. Forrester when I was four, and by 6 was doing algebra and geometry. But back in the 50's the local public school system did not believe in moving kids forward into a challenging environment. The result was that I was bored to tears until, in the 11th grade, my American History teacher gave me to understand that she was not having any more of my minimal effort. For starters she informed me that I was going to enter the American Legion Oratorical Contest, and that I was going to apply myself properly (implication: or else). I did, and I won. All it took was for someone to see past my attitude and demand the best.

[Kirbstone]

Interesting, Bob.

Not being such material I plodded along at my boarding school curriculum and played quite a lot of chess, getting into the final play-off in my 5th form against a sixth former who eventually beat me & got the School Chess Prize.
The following day I was stopped in the main corridor by the Dean of Studies who said; 'They tell me you've got brains!'

That remains to this day the pinnacle of my precocious brain-driven achievements. I was all of 15 years old and it's been downhill all the way ever since!

Tom

[Tor]

Finally getting to writing back. I started to reply, and promptly got to busy even to read SC.

A fundamental problem with that thought is that sometimes, perhaps even most times, genius does not "self-start" and needs encouragement and nurturing to get going. Bright folks do well "managing themselves" once "up and running", but the bootstrap process (or that of getting a sustainable chain-reaction going) can be painful and sometimes fraught with grief. Being smart in a sea of dolts is a powerful de-motivator.

I can agree with the last sentence quite readily. However, school is a fabulous place for nurturing and forcing together exactly that sea of dolts to drag down the smart. Consider that in earlier America, teens and even pre-teens would often be already working and possessed of the means to live and work on their own, if not doing so. Though I will grant it to be an exceptional case, Admiral David Farragut was commissioned as a midshipman at nine, captained a captured warship at 12, and, according to Wikipedia, appears to have held his first job at a mere four years of age. Last I checked, being one of the youngest people around rarely promotes the sensation of being the only (or one of the few) brilliant folk in a sea of dolts.

Bullseye. My personal experience is in that mold. I was reading Ovid and C.S. Forrester when I was four, and by 6 was doing algebra and geometry. But back in the 50's the local public school system did not believe in moving kids forward into a challenging environment. The result was that I was bored to tears until, in the 11th grade, my American History teacher gave me to understand that she was not having any more of my minimal effort.

What do you think would have happened if you had been in a situation in which you were simply offered the option of continuing as far in reading and math as fast as you wished, with access to people who could teach further if you asked?

As I see it, and John Taylor Gatto has documented, modern school is much of the problem - and much of the problem with schools (the current ones in particular) is a systemic one, designed in (though gradually implemented) from the beginnings in 1850s Massachusetts, and parts quietly worked out by powerful interests before that. Many further "refinements" in the same direction have been created and promulgated by other powerful interests in the intervening time. John Taylor Gatto does a fine job of documenting this, in particular in his large volume The Underground History of American Education. Quite a bit of this is also mentioned in his much shorter and engaging Weapons of Mass Instruction.

Schools are most useful, in my opinion, for basic socialization and imparting a set of basic, yet critical, tools; they teach the mechanics of what one will need in later life. That the typical teaching tactic fails to mention why the skills will be useful in the real world is where the system fails. Tools do not exist in a vacuum; they need context to be relevant. Likewise, without context, ideas can frequently be irrelevant.

Regrettably, the failure mentioned above can be shown, with terrible certainty, to be exactly what the architects of modern school had in mind by an examination of their writings. That, more than anything else, is exactly what JTG rails about in his essays and books.

Depending upon which testing standard is used "genius" can be anywhere from 140 to 160+. The bell curve represents a normal distribution, and is symmetrical. Therefore in a large enough sample there will be just as many profoundly gifted people as there will be profoundly handicapped ones on the other end. Genius is not "common as dirt". It is vanishingly rare. I think what Mr. Gatto was trying to get at is that there are a lot of creative, intelligent, and inquisitive kids.

If restricted to that form measured by IQ tests, possibly. There are perhaps several possible answers to this one. In this case, I will first quote the Oxford English Dictionary, and then let Mr. Gatto answer this one in his own words, from "About the Author" in Dumbing Us Down:

Genius, sense 5: Native intellectual power of an exalted type, such as is attributed to those who are esteemed greatest in any department of art, speculation, or practice; instinctive and extraordinary capacity for imaginative creation, original thought, invention, or discovery.

Sense 6 b: A person endowed with 'genius' (in sense 5)

During [my time teaching], I've come to believe that genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us. I didn't want to accept that notion -- far from it: my own training in two elite universities taught me that intelligence and talent distributed themselves economically over a bell curve and that human destiny, because of those mathematical, seemingly irrefutable scientific facts, was as rigorously determined as John Calvin contended.

The trouble was that the unlikeliest kids kept demonstrating to me at random moments so many of the hallmarks of human excellence -- insight, wisdom, justice, resourcefulness, courage, originality -- that I became confused. They didn't do this often enough to make my teaching easy, but they did it often enough that I began to wonder, reluctantly, whether it was possible that being in school itself was what was dumbing them down. Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children's power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.

I can't claim anything special except perhaps a naturally mechanically inquisitive mind - that found books like The Way Things Work - the whole thing, not just the mammoth tales -- to be choice bedtime reading at a young age. Where I am today, though, has far more to do with having the space to learn things entirely outside of academics and perhaps the very school system that shut me out so thoroughly as a homeschooler that a chemistry teacher was unable to get around them enough even to teach my high school honors chemistry at 13. Had I continued with that, there is the possibility that I would now be a broke and indebted chemistry major graduate. As things stand now, I think few would deny that I have done well for myself so far, and have a real chance at becoming a leading figure in a small (but widespread) area (that I currently choose not to reveal here).

There is more I had considered including, but as long as this is I shall leave it here for now.

[Jack Williams]

I offered my friend Bob some copies of New Scientist and Time.
He said he doesn't read.
Watches the box.
What does one do?

[Tor]

I offered my friend Bob some copies of New Scientist and Time.
He said he doesn't read.
Watches the box.
What does one do?

This is often very difficult to help with in adults who have been through twelve years or more of school. While I haven't any experience with your country's specific school system and nor have I directly looked for the answers I suspect there is fairly little underlying difference in the area I think about. As for what to do, there may be only one thing that can work: to show (not tell) that real life is more exciting than staring at a screen. Here are two quotes from Weapons of Mass Instruction that illuminate the level of problem in bringing back an interest in life, here with children only 13.

I set out to shock my students into discovering that face-to-face engagement with reality was more interesting and rewarding than watching the pre-packaged world of media screens, my target was helping them jettison the lives of spectators which had been assigned to them, so they could become players.
...
Plunging kids into the nerve-wracking, but exhilarating waters of real life -- sending them on expeditions across the state, opening the court systems to their lawsuits, and the economy to their businesses, filling public forums with their speeches and political action -- made them realize, without lectures, how much of their time was customarily wasted sitting in the dark. And as that realization took hold, their dependence on the electronic doll houses diminished

The new curriculum I devised toward the end of the 1960s was intended as a counterattack on cowardice, stupidity, sluggishness, and indifference. It had nothing to do with test scores. The best work I did as a teacher always consisted of the same priorities: entering a personal partnership with anybody who showed a determination to become educated, then working inside that partnership to help meet specific targets the student set. Those too broken to want an education, I schooled. Over time a fraction of those were inspired by the example of more-enterprising classmates and wanted out of the school routines, too; others were unable to recover. Those I consoled by schooling them as elite children are schooled, by drill long and strong.

Adam Smith was right. Between children identified as bright by schools and those identified as stupid, hardly a difference exists but those created by deliberate deprivation.

From my own experience I can confirm the truth of this - and that private schools are often no better. In less than a year in one small private school I went from excited about learning to "not liking to read". I left school never to return when I was younger than JTG's students, taking my siblings with me at the advice of a friend and counselor. Hard as the experience was, looking back it came out unquestionably for the better in the end.

Back to your friend Bob, I don't believe it is possible to any definitive answers from afar. Much though it might be wonderful if it were, people are as unique as snowflakes and true learning will take place in an environment that reflects the nature of the individual. You may have some of the answers, but I cannot possibly have near as many of them as you already must.

Edited to add: None of this should be taken as attacking the lecture format per se. Indeed, this is often a highly effective method of transmitting some kinds of information with as little time wasted as possible when the listeners want to learn the material presented. This last is rather notably lacking in schools -- especially (for the US) in K-12.

[Kirbstone]

Speaking purely personally as 'head' of my own little family dynasty I look at my four offsprings now fast approaching middle age and also at my eight grandchildren, three of whom are teenagers and in secondary schools (in England).

Two offsprings are themselves educators (English, History & Classical guitar), (German, Eur. Politics & Harp). They are dedicated people who have produced children who are precociously bright and for me a total delight to be with. These are clearly destined to stand on our shoulders, figuratively speaking.

A third offspring is not in education, but is a highly productive caring individual and also a father.

The fourth has fallen between all stools directly resultant from an acquired substance dependency, which we have tried to overcome through very expensive institute therapy & 'drying out' &c &c, but the problem for her continues, cannot live with either of her two consorts, (one of whom she married), has landed penniless back on our doorstep and has brought her two adorable daughters to live with us for the foreseeable.

We are under siege, but have learned to cope with it for the time being.

As I see it, That's the Rot.....Drugs. They're everywhere now and I frankly do not envy parents of children nowadays trying to steer them through what has become a minefield.

Tom K.

[Sinned]

We have had four wonderful children and have 6 grandchildren with another on the way. We consider it remarkable and a success that we have, and are, steering them all to be clear of the drug culture. We appreciate that drugs are everywhere but we can only set the drug-free example and educate and discuss with them the dangers of drugs. Fortunately there are so many examples out there of individuals such as Justin Beiber popping so many pills that we don't have to look far. He is heading the way of Michael Jackson and Anna Nichole Smith ( recently there were programs on their lifestyles and what killed them ).

[Kirbstone]

Well, Dennis,

It seems we have a great deal in common. I was speaking to a (relatively) new Grandad today who was my last patient. His take on it was that the arrival of grandchildren opened up a whole new and lovely chapter in one's life that one didn't really know was there.

Of course we have absolutely zero control over these events, but it is indeed a great blessing to see them arrive and grow into real new people with engaging personalities of their own.
Mine range in age at the moment from 16 down to 7 months, the two mentioned being siblings, their Mammah at 41 having had another late fling at procreation!

It certainly keeps you young!

Tom.