rationalskepticism.org

Cito di Pense wrote:

Agrippina wrote:Is intelligence genetic? Does having high intelligence mean that your offspring are likely to be more intelligent than their peers? If those intelligent offspring aren't exposed to education, wouldn't they demonstrate the same levels of learnedness that other uneducated people display? In a post-apocalyptic world, where formal education doesn't exist, wouldn't survival skills trump book-learning? Then also, can't people with average intelligence still be educated to function at a higher level than more intelligent, but less-educated people? It's interesting to discuss this because of how poor our (my country's) education standards are, where passing rates are dropped to include the lowest-performing students, making our school graduates not terribly-well educated by comparison with other school-leavers in the outside world.

All other things being equal, an intelligent person is more capable of learning survival skills than someone less intelligent, if that's what interests him. That's a definition of intelligence, but you're welcome to come up with another. It doesn't mean a person won't simply be more interested in something else, so the bear eats him. He has to learn from the tribe what the real essentials are. In a pre-apocalyptic world, nobody can tell anyone else what the essentials are, so you have to figure them out from context. Intelligence helps or hurts, depending on how apocalyptic things are, mainly because the more intelligent you are, the more things are likely to interest you. Or maybe someone will friend you on faceplant.

OK, I agree with you on that: the more intelligent you are, the quicker you're likely to learn how to deal with whatever conditions you find yourself in. What about inherited intelligence? Do you think that clever people have clever children, in general, and that lower intelligence in families with high IQs is unusual? How important is "education" in small children? I'm thinking about another conversation I had recently where the other person claimed that school is more about teaching children how to learn, rather than teaching them "facts" as such, and that tertiary education does that. Our schools try to ensure that children are literate and numerate by the time they go to high school at 13, they don't need to know the basics of science and complex maths, and even in high school, they learn only the basics. Is this the problem? Should children be taught more at younger ages?