Education doesn't increase intelligence by making people memorize things, but by constantly reminding people that they might be wrong.

Memorizing data doesn't make one smarter... but learning concepts absolutely does.

The classic, "we'll never need this in adult life" is math like Pythagoras' theorem, or factoring binomial equations (remember FOIL?). We don't learn that math because it's practical for adult life... we learn that math so that grown ass adults don't think someone using algebra is performing black magic.

Seems silly... but it's just like how many folks never learned past middle school biology and now think XX&XY are the only chromosomal possibilities.

I am a flight instructor. I had to study the fundamentals of instruction to earn that title, so I believe I can speak with some authority on this subject.

When discussing facts, figures and such, we consider four levels of learning. The easiest, fastest and most useless is rote memorization. Rote memorization is the ability to simply parrot a learned phrase. This is fast and easy to achieve, and fast and easy to test for, so it's what schools are highly geared toward doing.

An example from flight school: A small child, a parrot, and some Barbie dolls could be taught that "convective" means thunderstorms. When a meteorologist says the word "convective" it's basically a euphemism for thunderstorms. You've probably already memorized this by rote. You would correctly answer this question on the knowledge test:

Which weather phenomenon is a result of convective activity?

A. Upslope Fog

B. Thunderstorms

C. Stratus Clouds

Okay, what should a pilot do about thunderstorms? Are they bad? What about a thunderstorm is bad? A student who can answer those questions, who can explain that thunderstorms contain strong turbulence and winds that can break the airplane or throw it out of control have reached the Understanding level.

Problem: Sitting in the classroom talking about something is NOT flying a plane. I've had students who can explain why thunderstorms are dangerous fly right toward an anvil-shaped cloud without a care in the world, because they didn't recognize a thunderstorm when they saw one. Living in a forest, people around here don't get a good look at them from the side; the sky just turns grey and it rains a lot and there's bright flashes and booming noises. If you can get a good look at one, it's a tremendously tall cloud that flattens out way up high and tends to have a bit that sticks out like the horn on an anvil. Even in the clear air under that horn you'll get severe turbulence. A student that can identify a thunderstorm and steers to avoid it can Apply their knowledge, and have thus reached the Application level.

It's a sign that you're ready for your checkride if, upon getting a weather briefing that includes convective activity, the student makes wise command decisions to either reschedule the flight for a day of safer weather, or for isolated storms plots a route that steers to the safe side of the weather and plans for contingencies such as turning back or diverting to alternates. A student that alters his navigational choices based on weather forecasts has reached the correlation level.

It's difficult to go beyond the understanding level in a classroom with textbooks and paper tests, which is too much of what K-12 and college is like.

I think part of intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns that can be abstracted and generalized, and memorizing data is just one means of making the data available to your brain for pattern recognition. Like, if you come up with a possible theory, the quickest way to test it is to see if anything you already know would invalidate it; so the more you know, the more quickly you can sift through possible theories.

So, yeah—education reminds you that you might be wrong, while memorizing things gives you a tool to prove yourself wrong.

People in this thread have a hard time understanding what intelligence denotes.

Hint: it's not success or being smart.

Education, done correctly, doesn’t teach you what to think but how to think.

A healthy level of skepticism, both of other people's ideas and of one's own, is a sign of great intelligence.

Intelligence is such an elusive concept, but here goes anyway…

Knowing stuff makes you knowledgeable. You’re either born intelligent, stupid or somewhere in between. No amount of studying will ever change that, unless studying also involves copious amounts of alcohol. In that case, you’ll only get dumber.

Anyway, studying gives you information and tools, and what you’re talking about is a bit of both. If you go through a training system like that, you’ll be equipped to process and evaluate information, but none of that changes how intelligent you are. Sure, you can sound really smart to other people by using fancy terms and explaining complicated things. Those words alone don’t make you intelligent. Having the innate ability to understand that level of information does.

I’m sure there are really smart people living in rural parts of India where they don’t learn to read or even count very far, but they can do really clever stuff when hunting birds or weaving baskets. Even though they didn’t receive much education beyond what they learned from the local villagers they can still be intelligent. If they were born in a wealthy family in UK, these people would probably go to Oxford and graduate with a PhD in no time.

Memorization have importance. We, as a species, are as intelligent as primitive cavemen. Our brains haven't changed that much since those times.

What allows us to be different, to have a prosper civilization, is the information we have stored. Much of that information is stored in our brains.

Critical thinking is of great importance. Of course. But let's not dismiss the ability to store that critical information.

So here's how I liken education. I've been an instructor at the Naval Engineering School so have a bit of experience in the subject.

First thing to learn is "facts" by rote memorization and then parrot it back. If you can do that you have learned something which is not unimportant and is an important base for the next step.

Then you learn how to apply those facts to help you in a specific set of situations. This is a very small hop above the previous step, but an important one, as now you know how to solve a narrow set of problems in a specific set of circumstances.

Unfortunately, this is where a lot of education ends because this is the easiest level to test. To go beyond this, you as an instructor must inspire the students.

The third level is when you take the facts you know and the situations to apply them and start modifying them to fit new novel situations. This now requires active thinking on the part of the student and will likely result in a lot of mistakes and suffering but this is where the instructor can gently guide them along and nurture their curiosity and keep their spirits up when they fail.

Next level is an important one, when the student starts to ask, "why does this work this way in this situation and this way in this situation"? That is the start of true wisdom.

And the final level of education is when you go back and try to teach the subject. That is when you truly open yourself up to learning.

You're right (but obviously not completely)

The most important skill anyone can have is information literacy. Schools don't reach it at all.

1. A peeve of mine is the ease at which they've correctly diagnosed the Dunning-Kuerger effect and liberally applied. Few, if any, recognize that there is controversy around the effect.
2. I think your insight is part of a growth mindset. A concept championed by Carol Dweck, it has been embraced by educators and, unfortunately, abused by managers. Too many people think a growth mindset is better than a fixed mindset.

3. Intelligence has many definitions and contexts. I agree that intellectual humility is a useful trait and makes people far more bearable to deal with, but there's a lot of ways to examine what intelligence is and how it operates

Is the Dunning-Krugger effect mainly displayed by low education people?

In my own personal experience pretty much everybody displays that in areas outside their expertise, and I definitely include myself in this.

For example the phenomenon of people offering what basically amounts to Medical advice is incredibly common outside the Medical profession - pretty much every-fucking-body will offer you some suggestion if you say you're feeling like you have a bit of a temperature or something generic like that.

It's also my experience that highly educated people don't have any greater introspection abilities than the rest (i.e. for self-analysis and self-criticism) or empathy (to spot when other people feel that you're talking of your ass).

Maybe it's the environment I grew in, or the degrees I learned and professional occupations I had (so, Physics, Electronics Engineering, Software Engineering) that are too limited to make a judgement, maybe it's me showing my own Dunning-Kruger effect or maybe my observations are actually representative and reasonably correct: whichever way, my 2c is that learned people are no better at the adult mature skills (such as introspection and empathy) than the rest, something which also matches with my experience that the Education System (at least were I studied, Portugal of the 80s and 90s) doesn't at all teach those personal skills.

So IMHO, your assumption that the majority of those people have low education is probably incorrect, unless you're anchoring that on the statistic that most human beings on Planet Earth have low education, in which case they're certainly the majority of the confidently incorrect even if they're no more likely to be so than the rest simply because there's more of them than of the rest.

PS: Also note that amongst highly educated people there are people from different areas which emphasize different modes of thinking. My impression is that whilst STEM areas tend to emphasize analytical thinking, objectivity, assumption validation and precision, other areas actually require people to in many ways have a different relationship with objective reality (basically anything in which you're supposed to persuade others).

There's a lot of different things that get pumped into "intelligence". There's "reasoning ability", "knowledge", "wisdom", and a whole host of others, some in the category of traditional intelligence, and others around things like emotional intelligence.

Raw knowledge is something that schools can teach through memorization. You have facts. Memorization isn't the best way to do it, since context and such can often make information stick better, but some things you're eventually going to memorize, intentionally or not (I don't calculate 66=36 every time).

Reasoning or analytical ability is much harder to teach, since you can't really make someone more able to have insights and such.

Wisdom is something that can be trained I'd phrase it. I don't think you can be taught it like you can a history lesson, but it needs to be trained like a sport. How to apply reason to a situation, how the knowledge you have relates to things and other bits of knowledge. Which things are important and which aren't.

It sounds like you're mostly taking what I've called wisdom, with a dash if introspection tossed in, which can play very well with wisdom. "How sure am I about this?" Is a question wisdom might make you ask , and you need to know yourself to know the answer.
Knowing how to question the right part of something, so that you're not getting caught up in the little inconsistencies and missing the big one, or considering the wrong facts that are unimportant to a situation.
(A pet peeve of mine) Sometimes people will bring up statistics of race in relation to crime. People with perfectly good reasoning ability and knowledge will get caught up debating the veracity of the statistics, or the minutiae of the implications of how other statistics interplay to lead to those numbers, both in an attempt to deny the conclusion of the original argument.
The more wise thing to do is to question why this person is making the argument in the first place. Use your knowledge of society to know there are racists who want to convince others. Your reasoning to know that someone more interested in persuasion than truth can twist numbers how they want. Reject their position entirely, instead of accepting their position as valid and arguing their facts.

I could be wrong though

Lol

I'd argue that learning to socialise, and the so-called social intelligence that comes with it, is THE killer argument for schools and against homeschooling.

I think that's a good part of it, learning fundamentals of things you'll need is also vital. I've grown to mostly appreciate learning how to learn. It's a skill that's implicit, but putting the building blocks in at an early stage regarding how to seek and learn knowledge sets you up so well for the rest of your existence.

No, education gives you a good faith foundation so your neural connections are well groomed and not messy. Arguing in good faith is the basis for what we consider a fact is, and our sciences and legal systems. It's the basis of progress. It also stops you from being bamboozled, even by yourself, and prevents delusional thinking.

And in terms of IQ, yes, remembering facts DOES make an IQ score go up significantly.

Curiosity and openmindedness are related to intelligence, along with resiliency.

Another way to think about it is to say that education is the memorization of knowledge, while intelligence is the application of said knowledge. i.e. book smarts vs. street smarts. They aren’t the same things, but are two building blocks that work together.

At least that’s how I look at it.

Memorization is such a strange thing to try to teach. I was never good at that in school but could sing any song on the radio after hearing it once. In school I was good enough at math up to a point because I was so bad at memorization got good at thinking my way through it. Was much better at word problems than equations in elementary school.

I do agree with the premise of the shower thought - part of being educated is learning through mistakes. Making mistakes is one of the fastest ways to learn something, and is the main reason I'm good at my job. I am happy to work in accounting where mistakes don't kill anyone.

There was a popular author of technical books about the Commodore 64 who thought nuclear bombs aren't real.

You can have a few neurons really good at one thing, they don't map over to other things.

Many times when I post on Lemmy I am then educated. I do appreciate it a lot, thanks everyone.

I think it's more nuanced than that, and it really depends on the level of education.

Making kids memorise things also teaches them the process of learning a thing. Testing them on facts, dates, and formulas has value because it tests whether they're able to learn those facts, dates, and formulas.

In high school maths, I had to learn formulas. When I was applying to university, the admissions test came with a formula booklet. It was assumed I knew how to learn formulas, they were testing whether I'd learned how to look up the correct formula, and apply it. They weren't just testing my mathematical ability, they were simultaneously testing my reference skills. I only really appreciated that when I was much older.

Education improves intelligence marginally by forcing people to use parts of their brains more, which then remodel to be more efficient.

Most of your intelligence is set.

Dunning-kruger is probably not an actual thing. It just conforms to our biases.

Education packs you with group of people so your instinct wants you to live in community and puts a boss ( teacher ) above you, because they want you to become a factory worker in capitalistic world. Poor animals are we.