The Demonstrable Dumbing Down of the West

One thing that has been noticeably universal in my educational career is how low the bar is set. Standards have been degraded to such depths that mediocrity is the norm. During high school, I went from being a studious, attentive student to just not giving a flying fuck. About anything. Around the time I started secondary school, the educational authorities had introduced a new system: the NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Achievement) system replaced the old School Certificate system, which was a more competitive system dependent on students at least getting a C. This was contrasted by the NCEA system, which was contingent on unit standards and an overall score or credits for the year to gain achievement. There were four basic marks you could gain in an internal assessment or external assessment (exam); non-Achievement, Achievement, Merit, and Excellence. For some internal assessments it was just Achievement and Non-achievement.

The real motivation of this system was to make it so easy to pass that even the most apathetic and cognitively-deficient students could get an Achieved (which was equivalent to about 35-40% overall, I found). But the effect it had was that of hollowing out the challenge and will to work hard for your marks in a class. Also, the gap between a Merit and an Excellence is so immense that was barely worth the disproportionate effort for the majority of gifted students to even bother pursuing it; a high Merit is worth the same as a low Merit on paper.

And it’s the same story with tertiary level education. The emphasis for education since the turn of the century has been on getting as many “bums on seats” as possible; not on educational quality. This has somewhat ironically been accompanied with a steady hike in non-learning expenses; administration costs, subsidising trips, and student services. And we’ve seen the function of university education change along side this policy: The major bulk of people are not gaining anything from their university experience apart from a piece of paper and mountains of debt (and maybe just the latter). Indeed, an American study of 24 universities found that 45% of students were not finding any gains in their writing, critical thinking or reasoning skills.

The past function of higher learning was to have those cognitive elites of a society pursue intellectual endeavors and put things into practice that they were capable of and deemed worthy; it was a privilege, not a right. It was largely the domain of the higher social strata of society, exclusive of people who could do less with this additional knowledge and scholarly pursuit.

But times have changed. This has been the net result of a concerted effort to marginalise men and encourage a feminisation of the learning environment, especially where White males are concerned. Every historically disenfranchised group must now be treated “equally” and subject to undue attention and adoration, except the so often chronicled oppressors (White males) who are already too equal and must be de-“privileged” and de-balled to accommodate a  leveling of the playing field- to their direct detriment. This leveling of the educational playing field has also paralleled another trend: The elimination of competition in school academics. A more “fair” and “equalised” school curriculum structure ensures that girls are outperforming boys in all areas in primary education, based primarily on the presumption that any inconsistency in achievement is based on environment and culture, and not on genetics or biological differences. This issue is catalysed by a forceful, society-wide integration policy that education is not exempt from. Undeniably, different races perform differently at different types of educational environments and have separate learning cultures (or lack there of), and the same is true for the sexes. But nobody tell the government that.

Given the leftist domination of academia at the highest level in the West, it should no surprise that a vast number of Western universities wallow in the shallow puddle of political rhetoric and agenda-driven narratives in stark opposition to real data, critical thinking and the hard sciences. Instead of being run by intellectuals and genuine truth-seekers, these institutes are run by anti-reality ideologues. Who else would encourage delusional feminist bovines to stampede wildly on campus? Left-leaning politics is is an undeniable aspect of the world of “higher” education, further consolidating the real non-value of most liberal arts degrees, and a proliferation of anti-White racial preferences in university intake, or Affirmative Action.

All of this lowest common denomification has taken its hazardous toll on the West. The Flynn Effect, or the ability of average IQ scores to continually rise from non-biological means has stopped. But I suspect it has less to do with us reaching our cognitive limits, and more to do with meticulously masochistic immigrant policies and egalitised education policies. Illustrating this point further, a Danish psychologist by the name of Helmuth Nyborg has found that the IQ of Denmark will fall dramatically in the latter half of the century as third world immigrants begin to dysgenically dominate the country.

But there are upsides to this modern era if you’re educationally-inclined. The major perk for the knowledge-seeker is the ease with which technology has allowed the acquisition of information. Now, anyone with a PC and an internet access has unprecedented levels of knowledge at their fingertips. Anyone with the desire to can view Yale courses online or find the most complex subjects broken down into a manner suitable for all styles of learning on Google. Presently, I’ve taken the initiative to relearn all the mathematics I shuffled through during high school- and proceeding beyond that level to gain as much knowledge as humanly possible.

As the assembly line of mainstream universities continue to break down and produce increasingly unsatisfactory products emphasising quantity over quality, more and more employers will disregard that meager bachelor and resort to other, more suitable means of discerning employee suitability. And only once that inflated educational bubble pops, will the real value of education be once again realised; That not everyone can or should be encouraged into higher learning, that doing so reduces the real worth of education, that people learn best when they are segregated on common attributes, and not herded into the same communal gangbang called the modern classroom.