[ExI] Improving schools

[William Flynn Wallace]

 Spike, you might want to look into fluid intelligence.  Mostly what gets
measured on IQ tests is crystallized intelligence.  Fluid diminishes with
age whereas the other can grow indefinitely.  Fluid is what is responsible
for creativity and the ability to adapt to novel or at least different
conditions.  Yeah, we older people get fixed in our ways.

Like trying to measure creativity, measuring fluid intelligence has proven
difficult.  Some of the tests out there are just silly.  But it's there and
may be what your brightest students are good at, along with the usual
memorization and so on.  (An idea comes to mind:  maybe what is lacking in
idiot savants is fluid intelligence.  Clearly they can memorize incredibly,
which is crystallized.)

I'll look into that.  Never have researched it.  I don't see it anymore,
maybe because of the difficulty of measurement.  Henry??

bill w

On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 5:04 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
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> *From:* spike at rainier66.com <spike at rainier66.com>
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> How I’d Change School
> 
> By Mark Sisson
>
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> >…Dave, there is so much to say on this timely topic, but I want to make
> this brief and deal with only one aspect from the article…spike
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> We have a new ist to add to the list of ills in our world.
>
> We have had for a long time schools accused of being racist, sexist,
> classist, thisist and thatist, and have no doubt it is true regardless of
> what they do to combat these things.
>
> OK well, covid came along and they had to shut it down, not necessarily
> because it is so dangerous really but because the insurance rates for doing
> so are out of reach.  Insurance companies don’t care about the ists, only
> about their potential costs and liability should the schools open and a
> bunch of students catch.  Well, OK we get that: if bad things happen,
> insurance companies pay and they must pass on the expense to insurance
> customers.  Somebody has to pay for everything.  Insurance companies cannot
> manufacture wealth any more than the government can.
>
> When the shutdowns came, it was clear enough that remote learning was an
> inferior form of education for most students.  But it isn’t racist: all
> were shut out regardless of that, same with sexist, same with economic
> status, so it was none of the usual ists to close the doors and open the
> computers.
>
> What I have found most striking from the start is that although most
> students don’t do as well, the better students do just fine, the learn as
> well outside class as in, and the best students do better with online
> learning than in person (fewer distractions.)
>
> Well, we need a new ist to describe the outrage that there is yet another
> factor causing the academic high achievers to achieve even more than before
> while the low achievers get almost nothing.  The mean SAT score goes down
> while the sigma goes up.  Clearly it isn’t fair.
>
> So what do we call that?  Smartist?
>
> spike
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