The reason why this generation is not the smartest (aside from the technological advances we have) is because it made gaining knowledge too easy. And since it has become too easy, some have become lazy to go and study their homework. The solution most students (including me) use to finish homework is to go to Wikipedia and copy-paste information. Although effective in finishing homework, this does not input knowledge into our minds. We just took something from the internet, changed a few things, and pass it to our teachers. We did not "learn" anything.

Please refrain from steering this thread into the lands of unknown off-topics.
The topic is education and how it could be improved. The topic is not, however, how smart this generation or you personally are.
There is a brought field of references you can use to further your point of view on this particular topic, but please use them not to stray away from said topic but to enhance it.

In every generation there are people rumbling on and on about how dumb young people are these days and how everything used to be better, yet humanity progresses more and more. I encourage you to find a ground that does not depend on your very subjective judgment of the current situation.
Additionally: If you are a person who just learns for a test and forgets it afterwards, that's not necessarily a problem that could be fixed by changing the whole education system.
That's a problem that existed ever since people started teaching others.
You need to put some effort into things yourself. If you want to gather new information to increase your understanding of the world, do not turn to the system and ask it to do it for you. I doubt there are any valid excuses that could explain why you do not spend some time every once in a while to learn. There are people who, even after finishing school, spend their lives improving their knowledge using the resources some of you complained about in this thread.
Now, I am not saying that whatever your current education system is is a good one. There are surely some or even many ways to improve it, but the first step to improving yourself as an individual is not bickering about the system but doing something to help yourself.

If you are going to suggest changes of a particular education system, please give a short layout of how your current education system works in the first place. Else nothing can be said about it.

I think that we should stop thinking about why technology is bad for education but how this should be fixed. The definition of stupidity changes, there are literally retards with almost superhuman mathematical abilities and in every other way they are strongly lacking in intelligence with tiny IQs. Some would think of them as geniuses and others would think of them as simpletons. I like to think that they are both. I think we should be asking questions about whether we should calculate intelligence through exams or through IQ tests. Maybe we need to change the system of giving a load of kids lots of stuff to learn, having them sit in a room being told about it by a teacher through the year and then deciding who is better by asking them to prove their knowledge in written form.

Technology is making it harder for teachers to test children's ability through homework and this might be a problem. On the other hand you could say that kids who don't bother to learn the material when they have someone trying to teach them it deserve the grades they get when they realise they know nothing during the exams.

I think it is the purpose of schools to turn less intelligent people into harder working people who are cleverer than they would have been otherwise. It should also do a whole range of other things but those are not important to this point. If there is a problem like wikipedia then the teachers will have to work harder to make the students want to learn and do the homework. I have often copied and pasted homework from the internet and it usually doesn't get me into trouble, but I will only do this if I think the prep is unnecessary or useless. If a teacher can pursued me that doing the work will make me more knowledgable then I will, in most cases, just do the work.

I am not really sure what I am trying to say here so take from it what you will. And as Redundant said, please only mention things which are relevant to something about education.

Thank you for reading.

I'm certain that I've already mentioned the pure difficulty of accurately measuring "intelligence".

The existence of supposedly contradicting but correct views, the example you provided that I assume refers to mathematical savants, demonstrates that there is more than one dimension of intelligence. That is, there is more than one way of being "intelligent".

The problem arises from the issue of not knowing how many ways of being intelligent there are, and how much we should value each of those ways. The issue is identical to the issue presented in the following problem:

if f(1)=1 and f(2)=3 and f(3)=6, then what is f(4) equal to?

The answer, assuming no additional information, is undefined: anything we want it to be, but not any particular one of the things it can be. If we enforce that f(x) is represented by a quadratic, then we acquire that f(n)=(n*n+n)/2 easily enough. But what if f(4) is actually 9? We can't make predictions correctly if we enforce an incorrect assumption, and thus we can't assume.

We can't make trivial assumptions about what intelligence is. Questions about what intelligence is are thus most easily answered by assuming a numerical relationship between some number of metrics and some other number of future metrics.

That is to say: "Given this information we've discovered about this person via tests/interviews/etc, what is the chance that he'll be able to complete task Y given this data about all of the other people who have or have not completed task Y?" is a valid statistical question, and given the data, even more or less answerable.

In short, you can suggest alternatives to testing for consideration, but you can't claim that it's better or worse in some way without actually doing the study, especially since humans are essentially black-box systems that, while usually predictable, are not easily guessed at.

Furthermore, if history has taught us anything about intelligence, it's that exceptions will always appear in places we've convinced ourselves they can't.

As an aside, as it currently stands, and as I would expect that it has always stood since the dawn of public education, motivating the students has always been the biggest common difficulty. That's an issue with a lot of contributing factors (one of the few times I will not immediately question an argument starting with "videogames are bad because..."). As pure cultural reform is impossible and attempts at it are generally frowned upon (for good reason), it's also an issue that has to be worked around on a case by case basis rather than solved systematically.

I cannot immediately criticize students that turn to Wikipedia or whatnot for their every answer. I can immediately criticize students that turn to Wikipedia or whatnot for their every pre-prepared and effortless answer, as that both denotes the trivialness of the problem, and their own attempts to trivialize the problem further. In short, I will criticize people for being lazy. Of course, I mean that in a variety of ways, as it depends on to what end and in what manner the work is trivialized. If the work is meant to encourage such trivialization, for example, since in "The Real World" a number of important problems have already been solved in more general cases, applying those general cases and performing some sort of critical analysis from there is saving incredible amounts of time, rather than simple laziness.

Or, alternatively, in the situation that a person has true and demonstrable understanding of a concept, then personally trivializing it should also be acceptable. That is to say: if you can program a computer to do a math problem for you, you probably know how to do the math problem by hand too, or at least the more important steps. There is the occasional bit of programmer magic required for certain intermediates, naturally, that not everyone (or sometimes not anyone) is expected to understand. I don't disagree with these scenarios, since it still required some modicum of effort towards actually understanding the problem and the solution on the part of the student.

Technology can definitely be an asset or a detriment to learning, but it's not specifically nor inherently one or the other.

I am not even going to bother quoting any of that and I will try to direct this argument vaguely towards education again (you did a couple of paragraphs on education in your post but that seemed more like an afterthought or a tribute to relevance).

I think you are right that any form of testing should be based on the probability of someone's success in likely future scenarios but I do not think that this should be what the education system should be based around. If exams were based on things which did not relate to what we learnt in school thorn it is likely that quite a lot of people would stop going to school of that school would change in order to prepare them for the new test. This demonstrates the attitude most people have towards the system and it's apparent purpose. If the education system was sufficiently beneficial in other areas to improving exam marks then people would, in most cases, still go regardless of its relevance to exams. I hope what I am saying makes sense.

I believe that testing (in the education system, not in general) should either be to gain information which will allow a student to be taught more effectively, or should be to work out the values (this is probably the wrong word) we have already mentioned.

I know what I have said simply points out something which I believe is a problem while neglecting any suggestion of a solution but this is because I am a kid on a forum who is ridiculously under qualified to ever be in a position to solve such problems and I simply want to complain about school while trying to seem intelligent and to avoid addressing this fact. Nevertheless I will ignore these things and try to find or suggest some sort of solution.

I believe there is space in the syllabus for more useful skills or character development. This might be because of the length of school days I have (a bit longer than most people have for my age I think) and the skill of a large number of my teachers but who cares if I am ridiculously biased? This is an Internet forum remember. For example my geography teacher spends about half of every lesson (on average) talking about completely random things like why short people go out with tall people and 100 year old polar bear eating sharks. Despite this he still has time to teach us more things than a lot of other teachers. You might argue that geography is harder to teach but I think the 3 and a half hour exam for it indicates otherwise (other exams are usually around 1 or 2 hours long at my level).

I am descending into rambling nonsense so I will make my point while this post is still legible. If teaching was more efficient and less time was wasted or even if the exam syllabus was made smaller teachers might have time to teach more valuable things. I can't suggest what these valuable things might be yet because my brain is turning to mushy goo as I write this junk.

Thank you for reading.

The thing about exams in school these days is they don't really measure intelligence. They measure your determination to memorize words in order to get a high number(grade) written on some piece of paper(your worksheet).

After my exams I might make a pile of all the old schoolwork I have and put it next to the exams I have taken. It is ridiculous how it has taken me 3 years to prepare me for 30 and a half hours of answering questions.

I find that generally, this thread leans towards a progressive viewpoint: abolishing the written tests/exams, and focusing on abilities and maybe spoken tests.

There are two problems with the latter:
1. As with many things, the approach and its effect will depend greatly on the person in question. One pupil might be better off doing practical things, another will excel in verbal communication, while another one might be better taking a written test. In our education system, we have a mix of these three categories. This is just a boiled-down version of what suomynona put earlier: different people have different qualities, and it is difficult to measure or discover these qualities at an age early enough to give plenty time to educate until maturity, and late enough so that the qualities are actually measurable.

As of now, in Belgium, you can choose between different courses from age 12-18. One for every of these three categories (although the verbal category is really only minor, and I know very little about this drama education). Each category splits into different subcategories as the pupil progresses. An advantage with this approach is that the pupil might be 'guided' better into improving what he is already good at. A disadvantage is how a pupil might end up in the 'wrong' subcategory. The latter happened to me: I studied Latin/Modern-Languages from age 10-16 (I started 2 years earlier). Now I am studying a bachelor's degree in Biomedical sciences at the university of Leuven. My choice during 'secondary school', as we call it, was greatly detrimental to my later choice. My point is: creating too many categories might 'lock' a student into one course without much flexibilty. Creating one communal course might hold some pupils back, or be too 'difficult' (not well-suited) for others.

2. The written form of examination is much easier speaking from an infrastructural and logistical point of view. Verbal and practical examination is costly in time, amount of monitors necessary, materials, ... while a sheet of paper and a pencil is not.

Research for different methods of testing is, as with all research, costly and time consuming. Besides, what is a good result? A good result would be that the pupil retained information or an ability better than with other methods. But how do we test that? Do we follow these people for years? You would also need to conduct a global experiment with people from different nations and social backgrounds.

A second tree of thought arose from whether or not technology is beneficial to our current model of education.

I think, again, it depends on who is (ab)using it and what they are (ab)using it for. Since the dawn of the internet, it has become fairly easy to let someone else do your homework. Since the dawn of the computer and standardised fonts and typefaces, indications of identity have become more and more complex. Personally, I use the internet, newspapers, newssites, magazines, wikipedia, ... all the time. Some of my syllabi have online parts (video or audio material, simulators, ...). It just depends on how you choose to use technology.

Lastly, I would like to add that there's a huge difference between academic and non-academic education. A lot of the complaints I hear from secondary school students are:
- Not autonomous enough, I don't want someone to hold my hand, ...
- Waste of time, boring, ...
- Not learning what I want to learn
- Not learning what's useful

As it is, all of this changes once you enter the academic world. The level and amount of information you get to process will be far higher. You will have a lot of time on your hands (excluding some courses ) to work individually. As it is, I see that a lot of people who had complaints, now waste their time. When they are let go of, they don't take their chance to achieve something. You have to ask yourself the question "If I don't have to work, will I work more than if I have to work?" and answer fair.

I completely agree with the first part or your statement. But there was also a discussion on whether exams should make so much difference. I am not going to dress this up as an argument because you would probably end up winning but I find that the exams are not large enough (at the level of education I am at) to truly indicate much of the person taking the exam. This is especially so in sciences (and I would say maths but maths needs to be mathematical). I would like to clarify that so far I have done alright with education etc etc so I have no other reason to detest it that the unavoidable stress of exams and the amount of time spend learning things I will never need to know again. I mentioned science earlier and you could argue that since science is the study of the world around us that we naturally should teach it in schools. This is correct, we need to teach children about the works around them. However, when the knowledge of how to make sulphuric acid or ammonia or how to fractionally distil crude oil is being talked about I am not sure the "sciences is useful" argument holds up too well. Having said this, I would be sad to lose science since I am now going to only do sciences and maths (English education teaches a large range of topics up until GCSE exams (for 15-16 year olds with some people taking them early) and then narrows down to more detailed learning in four subjects for A level).

I lied about not dressing this up as an argument.

Sorry about my apparent hatred of paragraphs and that this post is a blob of ugly text.

Thank you for reading.

It seems to me that you have a problem with the broad spectrum of information you are taught. Dividing into subcategories and letting people choose might make it so that certain pupils choose for an 'easier' course rather than taking the challenge and learning something. Or maybe it will have others end up 'locked in' in one direction without the flexibility to change.

Besides, chemistry, physics, ... are very basic in secondary school. I wouldn't call science at that level more than general knowledge that everyone should have. What do you learn now in science classes?
Physics: Newton's laws, basics of radiation, energy, heat, ...
Chemistry: Categories of bonds, the table of elements, basic organic reactions and experiments such as distillation, basic chemical principles such as freezing and evaporation temperature and pressure, parts and structure of an atom (protons, electrons, neutrons, ...)
Biology: theory of evolution, species, the cell on a very basic level, ...
Maths: differentials and integrals (calculus), algebra, systems of functions, ...

While I appreciate your effort, and anyone who chooses a scientific curriculum, I believe that the majority of the world's population can be taught these principles and theories if they are motivated enough. The systems are fairly easy and should require not that much of intensive studying.

Science becomes increasingly easy with how you approach studying it. If you really are interested in these principles and how the world around you works, you will find that, once you understand these basic principles, what follows is rather logical.