to other countries? Are we smart or are we so ignorant as to think we are superior? What about our E.Q.?
I’d say look at our indiviudal governments, our progress, what we find entertaining, what we seem to value most, our crime rates . . .
Unfortunately I have not been able to travel much but looking around to where I have been and, well, I am not impressed. Of course I do spend 8 hours a day in a bar . . . (No offense to my patrons of course and keep those tips coming!)
Looking forward to learning more about other countries and cultures though and to all of your opinions . . .
Oh, another Blame America First excuse for delaying our war on Iraq. Great. Just great. All summer long there has been nothing good on TV, and the new season doesn’t look any good. Football is going to be stupid this year, so if we don’t get to watch a war we will have have more American Idol, Survivor, Who Wants To Get Screwed By a Millionaire.
For reference, that was a sarcastic hijack. We will now return you to your regular reprogramming.
There’s a difference between being smart/having a high I.Q. and being educated or informed. That could be your answer staring you in the face.
I suppose our ratio of educational opportunities : willfully ignorant citizens might be a little bit dismal, but I haven’t spent enough time in other industrialized countries to make a decent comparison. All of the Europeans I’ve met in the U.S. were college-educated, and I’m guessing not a very random representative sample.
Actually I would say that we have some of the most educated people on the planet. In a recent issue of “Skeptic” they claim (and had sources-but I didn’t check) that the US is number one in the amount of people who have bachelors degrees. Also in the same “Skeptic” they went into the so-called “myth” of the bad American educational system.
I’ve yet to have the pleasure of reading this source, but it looks like junk to me. The claim is arbitrary on several levels.
First things first, degree does not equal intelligent.
This looks like a recursive definition. Like slortar pointed out, it’s pretty useless to set a standard based on yourself.
Think proportions, though there may be alot of Bachelor’s, there’s also alot of people. Though a relative value may be a better indicator for comparative purposes, it’s still more-or-less useless. All it really points to is completion rate for first tier higher ed.
Comparing educational systems is like comparing snails and oranges. Different countries have different expectations and goals in thier educational systems. As a result students learn very differnent things.
In my own very personal experince, intelligence forgot to take a geography lesson. There’s smart folks and dumb folks everywhere.
A tenner says this thread moves to GD by tomorrow.
Exactly. If a perfect test that measured innate intelligence without regard to upbringing, culture, health, and education could be invented, no one place would score higher than any other, on average. Americans are not smarter or dumber than any other group, but we are, as a whole, more educated in some things than others, and less educated in other things than others. It depends on what your basis of comparison is. To suggest that one group is inherently smarter or stupider than another is absurd, and could even be construed as racism. (Not to suggest that Americans are a race, but imagine if the title of this thread were “Is Japan’s collective I.Q. above average…”)