[R_Niko]

by truly educated, I don't mean how it is in North America, lots of useless degrees, some tradesmen and military. By truly educated, I mean a population that:

- is highly literate and at least somewhat invested in the arts
- economically self-sufficient, very low percentage of pop. in need of assistance
- is aware of the history and culture of their country and will contribute to upholding these things
- has some military training and could perform self-defence in case of an emergency or survive prolonged civil unrest
- is aware of and involved with politics beyond just voting.

What do you all say, additions or subtractions?

Also, would any government in the world allow such a population to rise?

[Hannibal]

Well, you might want to start with the title.

Other than that, I'd say that historical examples that you should look into would be classical Greece and Florence, Italy during the Renaissance.

The problems with my examples are that even during the Renaissance, literacy was 35% in Florence, tops.

Educated guess here, my constraint would be that this country you are speaking of is a sort of city-state with a relatively low population by modern standards and a form of general economic income (like the Swiss and their banking) that doesn't rely on brute labor.

It would also require some form of intelligence test just to get in.

[LeoneVolpe]

(12-18-2016 12:37 AM)Hannibal Wrote:  

Well, you might want to start with the title.

Other than that, I'd say that historical examples that you should look into would be classical Greece and Florence, Italy during the Renaissance.

The problems with my examples are that even during the Renaissance, literacy was 35% in Florence, tops.

Educated guess here, my constraint would be that this country you are speaking of is a sort of city-state with a relatively low population by modern standards and a form of general economic income (like the Swiss and their banking) that doesn't rely on brute labor.

It would also require some form of intelligence test just to get in.

[LeoneVolpe]

R_Niko Wrote:

Also, would any government in the world allow such a population to rise?

It's hard to imagine they would. But at least we have a chance with Trump. Here's a relevant excerpt from one of George Carlin's stand-up specials a number of years ago.

George Carlin Wrote:

"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying ­ lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I'll tell you what they don't want. They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

You know what they want? Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."

[Ouroboros]

That's a difficult question to answer. Here are some of my thoughts on the matter:
-Merely having a curriculum that includes the items you mentioned is no guarantee that a population exposed to that curriculum will meaningfully absorb or utilise any of it. Most of us learn algebra and calculus at school, how many will remember it by age 25? Many enlightened 19th century gentleman probably thought that extending literacy to the population would entail a population of erudite individuals working for the betterment of humanity...I live in a country with 99% literacy yet stupidity seems remarkably abundant. What would they think about the value of education if transported to the present day?
-When education is viewed as a means to an end, the focus will probably just be on the end (i.e. getting the required gpa to get a good job). This mentality encourages preparing for exams over meaningfully engaging with the subject matter, which in turn encourages cramming over critical thinking and knowledge acquisition. This is the mentality that most university students have nowadays.
-A culture that values and elevates celebrity gossip and sports above all else, makes these things not just a harmless distraction but a major focus of its waking hours, is not going to value intellectual achievements or education whatsoever.
-This may be more relevant to my culture, but tall poppy syndrome is like the kiss of death to meaningful education and literacy - it makes people ashamed to display any knowledge above the everyday banal for fear of appearing arrogant. Intellectual achievers being given derogatory names like 'nerds' or 'geeks' is symptomatic of this also.
-Most of the most impressive thinkers (in my opinion) seem to be autodidacts to a large extent. Again suggesting that the way people think is way more important than formal education.
-In light of the above: an education system that encourages critical thinking, questioning, and gives students the tools for verifying the truth independently, in conjunction with a media environment and parenting code that encourages rather than shames intellectual pursuits would be the best situation. Not likely to happen in the next few centuries or so...

[Leonard D Neubache]

You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

Education is wasted on people who don't want to be educated. Billions are spent trying to force round pegs into square holes and wailing, pulling our hair and gnashing our teeth when a certain percentage of lazy dipshits fail miserably.

Basic literacy and numeracy is all kids need. We are far removed from the days prior to public libraries when books were hard to come by and the internet didn't exist. The stark reality is that people who want to learn will do so. What's worse, kids are forced to waste their valuable learning years being force fed nonsense that is alternately useless as fuck or decades behind in real world applications (why the fuck was I forced to spend two weeks making a shitty clay dog and drawing fucking trees before later being passed or failed in another class on my ability to use obsolete computer systems?).

Let's face it. A guy flipping burgers or pushing trolleys around doesn't need the state to waste tens of thousands of dollars teaching him Hamlet and who Franz Ferdinand was. The reality is that much of secondary school is simply a brainwashing phase for academic marxists, and always will be because marxists recoil from the real world and inevitably become academics.

Bin secondary school and college. Apprentice all trades. Kids will have 8 or 9 years of PRODUCTIVITY and hands on experience in the real world. Cultural marxism will die screaming.

That is what winning looks like.

[Suits]

Punctuation and spelling would go a long way.

[bnmf]

(12-18-2016 12:16 AM)R_Niko Wrote:  

by truly educated, I don't mean how it is in North America, lots of useless degrees, some tradesmen and military. By truly educated, I mean a population that:

- is highly literate and at least somewhat invested in the arts
- economically self-sufficient, very low percentage of pop. in need of assistance
- is aware of the history and culture of their country and will contribute to upholding these things
- has some military training and could perform self-defence in case of an emergency or survive prolonged civil unrest
- is aware of and involved with politics beyond just voting.

What do you all say, additions or subtractions?

Also, would any government in the world allow such a population to rise?

You won't ever get such a population. Think, the median IQ in the USA is 103 or something? Those people are pretty stupid. Now, 50% of Americans are less than that.

[Genghis Khan]

(12-18-2016 11:43 PM)bnmf Wrote:  

(12-18-2016 12:16 AM)R_Niko Wrote:  

by truly educated, I don't mean how it is in North America, lots of useless degrees, some tradesmen and military. By truly educated, I mean a population that:

- is highly literate and at least somewhat invested in the arts
- economically self-sufficient, very low percentage of pop. in need of assistance
- is aware of the history and culture of their country and will contribute to upholding these things
- has some military training and could perform self-defence in case of an emergency or survive prolonged civil unrest
- is aware of and involved with politics beyond just voting.

What do you all say, additions or subtractions?

Also, would any government in the world allow such a population to rise?

You won't ever get such a population. Think, the median IQ in the USA is 103 or something? Those people are pretty stupid. Now, 50% of Americans are less than that.

Agreed, you'd probably need an average IQ of at least 120, if not more. Even then, intelligence has a dysgenic characteristic - IQ has a bit of randomness to it: the kids of two 120-IQ parents might have an IQ of 100. Have enough of these people and you have a downward pressure on intelligence: as time would go on, the less intelligent folks would reproduce more. There very much is an upper limit to the average IQ of a population. I would bet that what we see today with IQs ranging up to 108 for Hong Kong is as good as it'll get.

Even if you start conducting eugenic experiments the way China is with their goal of making future generations smarter - I imagine pushing the average IQ too high would have its own negative consequences. On a simple level, it could be something like not reproducing at or above replacement levels - effectively destroying your own gene pool and opening the gates to invaders. Supposedly, neanderthals were smarter than us - and guess who's still alive.

The reality is that a truly educated society is as much of a pipe dream as a social Marxist utopia - it does not compute when taking human nature into account. A truly educated person is actually a rarity in human history. An entire truly educated society is even rarer and especially so when you consider that even supposed paragons of virtue such as Sparta did not last. If you're interested, I'd recommend reading Will Durant's The Story of Civilization. You start understanding how frail societies really are, even the uneducated ones.