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Politics : View from the Center and Left
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To: Lane3 who wrote (27060)8/23/2006 5:21:12 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 541315
 
I'm not absolutely sure either but I do believe the average person is more educated. Maybe less educated in certain specific ways. Perhaps our ability or willingness to proper grammar has gone down, likely our geographical knowledge has on the average decreased, but we know more about other subjects.

I've read people argue that we were less educated by comparing people who have achieved a certain level of formal educational achievement, but the average level of formal educational achievement is now higher. Its possible that the average person with a high school education buy no college, was more educated in the past than the average person in the same situation now, but fewer people have only that level of formal education or less. Another type of argument that is used is presenting an old test to relatively intelligent educated people, and letting them see how they struggle with it. But the people taking the old test would have just studied that exact subject, and many of those exact questions. While modern adults might not have studied the subject in years, and even when they did study it you had different parts of the subject emphasized by the instructor. A third argument is similar to the 2nd but focuses on a particular subject that had more emphasis in the past, for example people might be asked geography questions and told that in the past many people could answer these questions. A 4th argument is like yours, anecdotal. You gave an example of one person. That one person might not be representative, or the one statement might not be representative of most of what that person says or people in the past might have had similar problems.

Also see
en.wikipedia.org
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