if the founding fathers, say jefferson or adams,

[patrick t. cakes]

were to materialize today, what education level would they be at?
would they be able to skate through an american university, high school?
would the average college kid of today be a super genius in colonial america?

anyone have any good reading on the evolution of intelligence?

its sunday im bored. :hi:

[Bonobo]

1. They would be PHD level in multiple disciplines...

And they would think we were brain damaged.

[JDPriestly]

10. Bonobo, you are correct.

If you want to know the educational level of Adams and Jefferson, read their correspondence. I have a copy of it.

http://www.amazon.com/Adams-Jefferson-Letters-Complete-Correspondence-Jefferson/dp/0807842303

It's interesting reading.

If you want to know about Madison. Read the Federalist Papers or a biography of him. All of them were very well educated.

Benjamin Franklin's story is astounding. He barely attended school but because of his innate brilliance became an innovative scientist, an entertaining and informative writer and a community organizer par excellence. These men learned languages, read amazingly widely considering how difficult it was to get books at the time and studied nature. They would probably not fit into today's educational categorizations. They had well-rounded educations. A PhD is usually a specialist who acquires a great deal of knowledge about his area of expertise. The Founding Fathers read widely and with gusto.

[Xenotime]

18. Was it just a one party system back then?

[JDPriestly]

19. That was the plan although divisions were evident at the

Constitutional Convention -- over slavery and other things -- that presaged the party system.

[AllentownJake]

2. I'm assuming they would do pretty well

if they weren't crushed to death by student loans

[patrick t. cakes]

3. aint that the truth

i think jefferson died with large amounts of debt.

[BrklynLiberal]

4. It is not the evolution of intelligence, but the devolution of education in this country.

Those people would have been geniuses in our current education system. They read the classics, knew about math, architecture, spoke different languages, knew how to compose long and interesting letters, had principles and original ideas..

not to mention all the rudimentary survival skills they possessed.

If they reappeared today, they would think they had been sent back to the Stone Age.

[patrick t. cakes]

7. devolution about sums it up

im a nontraditional student working on a B.S. in history (thinking masters)
and a lot of these classes have the feel of a funeral rather than a place of
higher education. i can almost sense the sadness in the profs, absolutely no form of
reciprocal interaction in a lot of my classes.

[surrealAmerican]

14. Yes, they would be considered extremely well educated by ...

... today's standards, but it ought to be remembered that they were extremely well educated by the standards of their time too. The schools of that period were generally pretty awful, and there was a much lower literacy rate than we have today. Few people made it all the way through elementary school in the 18th century.

[slampoet]

5. Have you ever seen a computer programmer try to plow a field or fix a wagon wheel w/o looking it up?

The average person from today would kill themselves with food poisoning preserving meat or canning veggies, have a cow kick them or flintlock blow up in their face.

I am one of the few oddballs who went on the internet before 1988 and also knows how to trim a horse's hooves and i can tell you that neither set of skills is all that easy to acquire.


I tend to go by the saying of Will Rodgers..."Everybody is ignorant. Just in different areas."



PS - It is a WHOLE lot easier to build your own computer than it is to design Jefferson's gardening system

[orpupilofnature57]

6. Ben Franklin would still have to break it down for Us.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

8. They would flunk a lot of spelling tests

[patrick t. cakes]

11. was spelling less of a concern

as opposed to knowledge itself? spelling actually seems pretty
trivial when comparing the two.

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

12. Just a joke -- many words were spelled differently back then

[patrick t. cakes]

13. no i know i thought it was funny

sorry should have clarified.

[orpupilofnature57]

16. Yeah ,like the " Monied Interests " he warned us about in 1814 ,pretty smart

too bad no one listened.

[Journeyman]

9. When Thomas Jefferson traveled to Washington DC for his inauguration. . .

as John Adam's vice president, he carried various fossils he'd acquired and about which he would soon give a talk to the American Philosophical Society, a group for which he had recently been elected president.*

In April, 1962, at a dinner he hosted at the White House for 49 Nobel Prize recipients, John F. Kennedy noted that the White House had not seen such a tremendous collection of intellect since the last time Thomas Jefferson dined there alone.**


*http://www.ansp.org/museum/jefferson/megalonyx/history-01.php
** http://hnn.us/articles/20061.html


Draw your own conclusions for where you think Mr Jefferson would fit into today's intellectual field.

[bulloney]

20. Jefferson would have been trashed by the Colonial Teabaggers (known then as the party of 'Nay' ).

Fossils? That's too evolutionary.

Philosophy? That's too liberal!

(yeah I know that this would have been pre-Darwin)

[treestar]

15. The system would not have served them as well

But they were inherently intelligent, and probably would have done well anyway. But they might not have been such renaissance men as they were. Franklin in particular might have gone into the sciences. They might not have been photogenic enough to go into politics, which is probably one loss of today.

[Igel]

17. Interesting question.

They were masters of multiple fields.

Then again, each of those fields was rather smaller than today. It was easy to read the Royal Proceedings and stay cutting edge in physiology, physics, chemistry, and even mathematics. Now you'd be hard pressed to simply read all the research published on the chemistry of organometallic compounds. Organic chemistry as a whole? Not going to happen. Chemistry as a whole? Not in your wildest dreams.

In school you'd be taught Latin and Greek and perhaps Hebrew, and be expected to read in the languages. You might also learn a modern foreign language. US history? World history? Not so much. You'd be taught what the standards were for writing, and be taught to mimic good style. We're taught to mimic good style, as well. But the style is *different.* Radically so.

Same problem in college. When 1% of the population goes to college, you can gear education to that level. When 20% of the population goes to college, you gear it to *that* level. Relevance? Making sure that the bottom 25% of the class is keeping up? Not going to happen. A mass of stuff that we need to learn wouldn't have been required, if known. Different standards, different emphases. So by comparison with today's college graduates they look brilliant; they were very smart by the standards then. But super geniuses? Not likely. Most super geniuses would never had had the chance to become literate.

Then there's the problem of leisure time. They had more, much of the year, than most academics do currently.

At the same time you'd have all kinds of practical stuff to know. Stuff that we'd be stumped by. On the other hand, we have probably as much practical stuff to know, stuff that they'd be stumped by. Call it a wash.

The result is that it's hard to compare. Very hard.

My advisor broached the same topic over Brugmann and other neo-grammarians. They knew their stuff. My advisor was jealous. So I asked how much there was to know in his field, in pages. He had a fantastic number. We had to read perhaps 5-6k pages a year in it, pretty much every year. We had to know linguistics and languages and literature, and learn them all starting at age 18. Then at college we had GE requirements and all sorts of other things. They knew some of their languages natively, others were taught in gymnasium. They specialized as undergrads. They didn't need to know literature in addition to their "main" subject. And the sum total of what there was to study composed perhaps 10k pages at the *end* of their careers--and they had written much of it. We'd read that in two years or less. Advisor was impressed because they could cite from it freely, but I said that if we had 6 years to study 10k pages of stuff, and then for the next 20 years studied the same 10k pages of stuff, we'd do a fair job of citing it, too. They had a much smaller universe to study, and did a very good job of it. They also couldn't easily refer back to it and so had less external support.

Moreover we tend to only see what they got right. Most of the 10k pages they'd have studied or issued is utter trash. In some cases the reasoning was flawed; in other cases new facts invalidated their arguments.

He was depressed even more. I sort of made his idols grow clay feet, so instead of aspiring to be like them he had to admit that he might well have been like them.

on edit: I will give them one thing in which I think they were quite a bit better: They were wiser. They observed people and thought about them, they reasoned issues through in ways that tried to rise above petty concerns that most people these days fix on. They were able to come to conclusions that most people would oppose and argue them and demonstrate them--and do so fairly patiently, all the while being ready to compromise in order to do things that might hurt them personally. Most politicians this day lack the wisdom and foresight necessary for these things, and in this they reflect their constituents. I think we've gotten smarter but more foolish over time.