First Post, thanks for allowing me in your group.

I think one needs to be careful and clinical when applying definitions like 'idiots'. In the psychological sense, I believe an Idiot is strictly rendered as a person with an IQ of 20 and a mean deviation of 1. Such a person DOES NOT make up the summative nor curved norms of our society, far from it. Such a person is in fact not a functional individual.

Which is ironic because both the Greek and Latin derivations of the term refer to a private and/or lay person as opposed to a learned or 'professional' equivalent. Stupidity is not implied at all. Any more than it is with a 'salt of the earth' type characterization. Where mean IQ is a constantly redefined bar (your great grand parents might be deemed to have only an 80 IQ by present standards, even if an ability to read and write with a 6-10th grade capability provided them with a 100 mean 'back in the day' whereas many today cannot manage 4th grade literacy yet is rated very highly for generalist intelligence...) I think we need to look at both genetic and societal indicators for clues as to how much developmentalism is affected by heredity vs. ennobled by environment.

Probably the first point of discussion should be related to 'essential knowledge' and attention span. I have seen studies which claim that _adults_ in modern culture have as little as 2-4hrs of focussed awareness before they enter the equivalent of 'watercooler junkies' as a kind of mental treadmill effect. And that children can be rated anywhere from 30-45 minutes initially and perhaps an hour-interval-hour level with some training.

Why then do we lock our children up in the equivalent of state sponsored instituionalized day care for 6-8hrs a day plus another hour or two for bussing, an hour for preparation and 3-5 hours of homework? In the pre and even early 20th Century period such an approach would never be allowed for the simple reason that children were needed to maintain the hard labor of profit agriculture and so had to be excused for long periods in the summer and even, very early in the day, right through the fall and into midwinter (wheat) and spring (other crops) plantings. Yet still they managed to gain competency in the basic '3Rs' skillsets which frequently exceed the median of today's kids.

Why? If not because they had a much more focussed period /during/ school?

Growing up in the 'track system' of year round education, I remember school as being a miasma of cliques and boredom and teachers adopting a metered enthusiasm that never meant much for the quality of their work because it routinely was repetitive and yet disconnected in sequence and shallow in depth. You basically had a precessing helix of saturative classroom instruction across many subjects with 40+ strangers, then assumed homework leading to another day's instruction and finally a rest period whose very length (2 months) meant a regression as memory loss was accompanied by ennui if not actual discomfort at the thought of _repeating_ it all over again.

What I would like to see is a BIP based 'not the processor but the bus speed' driven testing regimen which determined the functionality of active memory access in various test groups as a functional guarantee of _learning ability_, not mechanical IQ. And then a curriculum erected which supported a corresponding metered attention span system (itself instrumented to measure things like dilation and focal point fixation of the eyes).

Do this and I think you would find that 'even idiots' have a better chance of learning on say a 2hr = 2 course basis of deep immersion teaching in specific subjects with 4-2-4 WEEK long semster learning periods and the ability to register for additional classes for gifted children. Teach a young person grade level 1-4 reading using a light pen and a computer screen to master letter recognition at the same time they gain (auditory) speech association and it may well be that you can skip ahead to grades 4-5 _writing_. But whatever you do, don't interrupt the cycle and don't shift among multiple course subjects with heavy homework loads or extended course days. Rather design learning around coursegroups optimized to specific intellectual capacities to generate basic, deep and inductive abilities as _complete modules_ of information handling. So that students may gain a sense of both functional completion "I know Kung Fu." and encompassment of a skillset relative to their abilities to understand it before 'filing it away' to move onto a new course subject (and now, math and physics!).

I think it was Locke who said that the children should be free to be children and not burdened too early with the realities of study if they were to achieve any real stability and happiness in their character before they began to mature. Even the Japanese, who have the highest education related suicide rates in the world, don't instigate high homework levels until out of elementary school.

Finally, in reference to idiot-box viewing habits, I think that they too can be suggestively correlated with the understanding that deep alpha brainwave patterns are the way our minds stop trying to memorize rote pattern knowledge and begin to INTEGRATE it, mentally, through synthesis. Where television stimulates such a deep neural behavior, it can be thought of as an early, addictive, stress relief to over stimulation of the learning systems. The problem being that it also overlays suggestive patterns (violence, sex, advertising) atop the basic learned knowledge effect even as it creates a sense of deep dissociativism 'it isn't real so therefore it's harmless' in children who SHOULD be exercising their imaginations to fully integrate their instinctive understandings with the real world.

We understand the basis of verbal, spatial, manipulative and educive vs. general intelligence. But we have little or no understanding of the FOCUS factors by which those various kinds of ability are incorporated like townships within the expanding mental landscape of our children's minds. It's like knowing the finish line but not the specifics of the race car or the track. And I think that, short of serious, interventional, eugenics; that this is what causes our society to fail to sustain it's mental status as aware individuals.

Jeep

P.S. I realize that a 2hr school day would still leave huge gaps of unresolved time lapse in our working societies but I also believe that there are ways around this by revesting creche` groups (mothers who are content to be mothers) and supragenerational (grand parents, and parental siblings) to the task of watching over our youngest. I also believe, firmly, in testing for aptitude and opening up PAID, short interval, vocational activities. Anyone who wants to drive a car as a 16 year old should look to supplying their local neighborhoods with groceries on a delivery basis that removes an entire layer of individual vehicle use from family work lists. Anyone who wants to have a state subsidized apartment when they turn 18 and want to move out of their parents supervision should start by learning a habitat for humanity type apprenticeship in everything from basic cleanup and demo to carpentry, electrical and finishing. So that they may accrue 'credits' towards lifestyle improvements that are beyond the satisfaction they get from the latest XBox or Episode of 'Lost'. Because hey, how many kids can look at their friends playing around and REALIZE that they are trading free-youth for free-adulthood. The number of low paying jobs that we undertake to 'license out' to what amounts to ethnic slave labor, as well as the cost to our economy could be _readily_ put back into a Future Gen program if we wanted to. Some kinds of mind may well not be suited for college. But all kinds of (human) mind is suited to growth. If it weren't, 'even idiots' wouldn't be happy with base stimulus that encouraged neurosynaptic firings.
What I am suggesting here is simple. You take a program like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and acknowledge that it will cost us around 276 billion dollars. That's 2 million 300 thousand, college educatoins at 120,000 per person. Or 4 million 600 thousand, 60,000 dollar condo living quarters for the people willing to BUILD THEM with their own skills.
We may scoff at 'idiots' as a kind of perilous wonder at what is wrong with them or ourselves. But we can never forget or dismiss them as an effector on our society. And once we realize this, it's more a matter of learning to impart what potential is there than assuming that (within the existing system) they can be made to have no place or improvement at all.

I suspect that the problem might be more solidly based on neurological wiring, rather than just the product of intelligent people living within a backwards social context. Both intelligence and personality are highly heritable traits, so putting someone who is inherently miserable into a positive situation isn't always going to solve that individuals problems.

"The Christian religion is a human invention like the faith of the Jews and the Arabs"--Benedetto Caetani, Pope Boniface VIII

I see evidence of this on a council estate near me.

Given a bit of sun the music is cranked up to the tune of 'Dont worry about a thing , everything is gonna be alrite'' and the bodys start to dance and the loud stupid behaviour fills the air.

anything to mask any existential problems, social and environmental problems and plain rank uselessness!