Sadly, the Flynn Effect is working now in reverse. If you didn’t know, for decades the collective IQ of the United States has been increasing. People have been getting smarter. Improvements in education, health care, and diet had been making it possible for each succeeding class year to score better by a significant and steady amount every year over the students of the previous year. Apparently, according to recent data analysis, it kept going up through the 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and the 80’s.
And then, in about 1991, people began to be born who were destined to do worse than their predecessors. People stopped getting smarter. In fact, they not only leveled out, they began to get dumber. Bummer. As a teacher who taught during that time period, I have to pause and wonder… was it my fault?
I want to be clear about my use of illustrations here. Not all of the faces I used in the collage above are actually stupid people. I am told Rowan Atkinson (who plays an idiot character named Mr. Bean) is actually a genius with a very high IQ. And some of the faces are not even from actual people. They are cartoon characters or animals or Donald Trump. And none of them actually caused the decline of IQ scores. (Although I can’t prove the actor Brendan Fraser didn’t cause it by making the movie George of the Jungle.)
Economic factors brought about by the Reagan Revolution probably caused the wheel of life to turn back towards the stupid end of the cycle. Rich people began sucking up and keeping every dollar possible, making themselves impossibly rich, and leaving the rest of us to fight over crumbs. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King turned the poorer suburbs into virtual food deserts of no nutritional value in every major urban area. Schools across the nation have been forced to teach to tests whose main and sometimes only purpose is to prove schools undeserving of their funding so States can shift that funding towards private and for-profit schools. Starved for proper funding, it is only natural that schools turned from learning institutions into baby-sitting services and uniformity indoctrination centers. Schools now put out only average and poor students because that was the goal of education reform all along in conservative minds.
So what, exactly, should we do about it? Well, the wheel will still turn. And as all wheels do, the part that is on the bottom will return to the top, and stupid will return to bottom as it obviously has before.
The next century is rife with problems that threaten human life on Earth. Those problems, like income inequality, climate change through corporate abuse of the environment, the nuclear threat, and Donald Trump, will have to be solved by the next generation’s smart people. When they do solve all those problems, the world will be better for it… or destroyed. One of those.
And don’t mistake my meaning. Stupid people have their own value. Clowns like John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers are doing a far better job of helping us understand the issues of today than the nightly news is. There is a great deal of fun to be had in watching the cat-and-mouse game of Robert Mueller and Donald Trump (where Trump is not the mouse so much as the cheese the mouse ate to start all the slapstick brouhaha).
And people who are not particularly smart can have great value in an infinite number of other ways. Simple people may never be able to do calculus, but they can make you smile and feel loved better than some of the sharpest intellects (who often tend towards cynicism and bitterness).
The wheels of the Stupidity Cycle will continue to turn because that is the very nature of wheels. We will eventually be smart again. We can’t keep getting dumber forever (though we did elect Trump). And this is a pessimist telling you this. So if this is completely wrong and off base, remember, I am also trying to be positive about the future.
Of course, there is the opposite problem too. Some writers are not hard to understand at all. They only use simple sentences. They only use ideas that lots of other people have used before. You don’t have to think about what they write. You only need to react. They are the reasons that words like “trite”, “hackneyed”, “boring”, and “cliche” exist in English. But simple, boring writing isn’t written by stupid people. Hemingway is like that. Pared down to the basics. No frills. Yet able to yield complex thoughts, insights, and relationships.
Ged Aero was the player character of one of my favorite kids. He was a psionic shape-changer who could transform into other animals, space creatures, and alien beings. He became so powerful that he naturally inherited the job of leader of the Psionics Institute, a criminal teachers’ union that taught psionic skills to psionically talented kids. It was a criminal organization because the semi-fascist government of the Third Imperium had made psionics illegal. He gathered students and taught them to use their powers for good. The students were all non-player characters to start with, but as new kids from school wanted to play the game too, and player characters were needed, the students of Ged’s psionics dojo became player characters.
But that, of course, is not how it works in real life… even without the nuclear physics which was an exaggeration for humorous effect.
Catch a Falling Star 
Another Brick in the Wall
I sincerely hope I never appeared in any way to be like the teacher in the video of Pink Floyd’s rock opera The Wall. That teacher represents everything wrong about education and everything that looms over us as a coming darkness if the conservative privatization movement continues to move forward with their evil sausage-factory plans.
In the video you see the teacher making fun of a student for writing poetry instead of participating in the rote recitation about math that the class is engaged in. The school is portrayed as a factory that puts masks on the students, makes them march in a line, and eventually pitch forward, face first into the sausage grinder.
The song was written by Pink Floyd’s bassist, Roger Waters. It was written in the long ago 70’s as a protest against rigid education systems in general, and British boarding schools in particular. But old problems can come back to haunt us.
Here’s the evil being protested. Schools should never be used to suppress creative thinking and enforce conformity. While it is true corporate America is hot for education that treats educating students like baking bricks, with attention to precise shapes and uniform size and color, that is not how kids learn. They have to be treasured for what they are, unique individuals, no two alike, and all possessed of varied strengths, skills, and talents. The idea of education is to help them add to what they are born with, use what they are born with, and fit into the jigsaw puzzle of working with and getting along with others. We cannot teach them by pressing them into molds with standardized high-stakes tests, or taking their individual faces away by always trudging through the same low level thinking skills year after year just because a textbook written in conservative Texas says so. Learning in the classroom needs to be through guided discussions, activities, and interactions. Not through filling in all the blanks on a worksheet.
My own children, for the most part, have been cheated by the public education system in Texas. They are bright kids, but have humongous school troubles stalking them like monsters, boredom, disengagement, and feeling like the young poet betrayed by the teacher in the video. While I always, in my teaching, fought to creatively present learning opportunities, I found good teaching to be a rare thing in Texas. It was sometimes actively discouraged. And it is getting rarer. The people who think teaching English means diagramming sentences and circling the adverbs are winning the battle for young minds. I am left at a point of futility where the only thing I can do about the brick-making is write rants like this one about it.
Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos should be pleased with themselves. The sausage factories in our schools are turning out sausages. Sausages don’t think for themselves. Sausages are easy to control. And when the time comes, some corporate fat cat will eat them and become fatter (hopefully only in the metaphorical sense). And I am guessing here, but I’ll bet sausages make up most of the Republican voting public.
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