So comparatively, if another country had even a few percent more smart people than America, they would be flying around in spaceships and colonizing new worlds.

"If America are not the dumbest nation, who are the dumbest."

I call bullshit. Prove it.

American's did not invent the automobile OR computers. The first automobile was invented by Karl Benz, in Germany, in 1886. The first programmable computer was invented by Charles Babbage, in England in 1883. The first modern computer was invented, depending on who you speak to, by a German military team led by Konrad Zuse (the Z2) or a machine invented by a British military team led by Alan Turing. Turing was definitely the first to plan and discuss one.

Doh !

:1orglaugh

Try living in Thailand and you'll never ask that question again.

Thanks to the nazi's.
Thanks to England

You can have point 3.. Congratulations America on the creation of gfy. :winkwink:

Then by that reasoning explain India or China lol, fucking China destroyed their environment and burned up all their resources for our fucking fake money lol and probably have given all their people cancer, I used to think they were smart years ago. India is definitely not much brighter. And the UK you want to talk about dumb White people lol, other than their top 2% the rest are inbred chav scum drunk fuck ups lol.

Ok you can have the moon, google, amazon.

But the car, computors, and the internet were not invented in Merica or by Mericans.

:1orglaugh

i love america - they are cool...

well, there you go. Proven.

I went to an American private school when I was abroad and followed their "education plan", it was like I was put 3-4 years backwards to say elementary school level...

the "tests" are usually multiple choice answers and if you are not a complete moron you can pass US middle school with no studying at all...

I actually had trouble when I returned back to normal non-american schools because I had missed so much in math and physics that I had to start reading books again :1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I do not think americans are stupid nor that they have low IQ...we are all homo sapiens and its a bullshit argument...but the US education system is a joke...not commenting on yale or MIT or harvard , just your basic middle school in the USA...its like your health care, over priced and bullshit...

Just another hate thread about stereotypes... meh

no need to fight over this - both countries are on position 6 - reunited at last :1orglaugh :helpme

As far as IQ we are #19 but the way I read it we are tied for 10th place with Australia, Denmark, France, Mongolia and Norway. At least we're smarter than Canada.

http://www.statisticbrain.com/countr...st-average-iq/

This, to me, is the core of the argument. It all boils down to how you define dumb. If dumb mean under-educated then there are countries that are far ahead of us and there are many countries that are far worse than us.

If dumb is meant to be lacking a general awareness of the world outside our borders, we have some issues with that as well, but there are plenty of countries with that same problem.

If dumb just means born stupid without the ability to learn or grow intellectually, then I think we are right on par with most of the world. I think most humans have the capacity to learn when given the chance. It is cultural and environmental things that determine whether or not they seek out that education.

I can tell you this...my first awakening to reality was in 1984 when I toured down in Peru.
The country was dirt poor. No middle class at all. Either very rich or very, very poor.

And yet all the kids there spoke several different languages and knew everything about the United States, Europe, and the rest of the world (they kept up on world events in all countries on their news broadcasts)

I felt "dumb" next to them. I can only speak English. I knew next to nothing about anything outside the U.S.

And in my travels since then...I've seen the same thing over and over. Whether it be Mexico, South America, The Bahamas, Jamaica, or Europe. I feel like I was cheated in our education system by not being taught different languages from kindergarten forward.
And when you are traveling outside the U.S. you suddenly realize that most people take a "world view" and keep up with events everywhere.
While our news broadcasts report very minimally on foreign affairs.

Just saying...it makes you feel "dumb" comparatively speaking.

What about photographic film, the phonograph, the lightbulb, the airplane, the elevator, the skyscraper, the liquid-fuel rocket, the modern day electronic computer (nice one, claiming charles babbage, we'd all be pulling potatoes for Lord Blacksmere if you boneheads were in charge), laser, compact disc, on and on. And then there's this:

"So we arrive at the same conclusion: as the world military balance stands today, even in the unlikely case that the entire world aligns against them, the United States could not be conquered." Dylan Lehrke, IHS Jane's analyst hahaha! every last one of you could put aside your considerable differences and stop slaughtering, raping, and cheating each other and join in one big, smelly, some-part-of-the-goat-eating army and you still couldn't defeat the US! Ooooooh, that's got to burn!

I'll give you we have a lot of dummies here though. Robbie has a point. And even though we don't have a Mozart or an Alcubierre we do have, or had until recently, a culture of celebration of disruption and optimization.

In ten years, unless Hillary is elected, the answer might be different.

Government spending per student (adjusted for inflation) is up 300% in the last 25 yrs, yet test scores remain flat.....

1. Government should get out of the education business (really out of any business except for Federal defense and providing a decent judicial system)

2. The teachers Union should be eliminated, all it does is reward laziness and keep GOOD teachers from being properly compensated

and PLEASE, before anyone says "teachers are underpaid".....do your research so I don't have to do it for you.

:2 cents::2 cents::2 cents::2 cents:

I'm in complete agreement.

To me there is a difference between dumb and ignorant/lack of education. Like you, I only speak one language (if you don't count knowing how to say 'please smother my balls in cheese' in Spanish :) ). Looking back on it I wish I would have taken some foreign languages in high school. For that matter I wish it would have been required. But not knowing something is not being dumb, it is simply not being educated on that matter.

To me dumb is the inability to learn or, perhaps even the unwillingness to learn. While there may be many countries where the people have a better overall education, I don't know that that makes me, or this country, dumber than them. It just means we need a better education system.

As for traveling and being blown away by other countries, I have seen both sides of it. When I went to Egypt in 2000 most of the Egyptian people I met were very nice. They would ask if I was American and I would tell them yes. They would ask where in America I was from and I would tell them Oregon and almost every single one of them would ask me if it was by Los Angeles, Chicago or New York. They knew those three cities, but nothing else about the geography of this country. I knew far more about Egypt then they knew about the United States. Were they dumber than me? Hell no. For starters they were speaking English and they just didn't have that piece of knowledge.

Countries With The Highest Average IQ

1- Hong Kong
Isn't it a former british colony with mostly European expats?
2-South Korea
I'm sure this happend after Guus Hiddink was coach of their national soccer-team?
3-Japan
Not convinced after fuckmeshema
4-Taiwan
I quess they have to think a lot about how to keep them chinese from their backs
5-Singapore
Say what?

A shared 6th place for:
The Netherlands
Germany
Austria
Italy

We should make bratwurst, schnitzel, ferrari, Johann Strauss, windmills, hookers and weed our common culture; bomb/nuke the first 5 on this list to dust and rule the fucking world once again! Would bring some sense back into this world.:pimp

I agree with this... Most iq tests i saw are bullshit. IQ is not about knowledge it's about the ability to gain knowledge

That's kinda what I meant in my first post....we are "dumbed down" not unintelligent.

We should be REQUIRED to learn Spanish, French, Russian, Dutch, German, etc. from the time we are in kindergarten or pre-school.

I know we all took a little French or Spanish as a high school elective, but it's not good enough.

We should be fluent in a few different languages by the time we are 10 years old.

But instead, we have politicians screaming "English Only". And trying to build a freakin' border "wall" (instead of just stopping the war on drugs entirely). And we are kept ignorant by our news media for damn sure.

I'm too damn old now to learn another language. It would have been easy to do it when I was young (kids have minds like sponges at the time of their life).

But at least I can now watch Al Jazeera America and get news events from around the world. :)

Seems that CNN only reports stupid shit from foreign countries (like the French sex scandal) that don't really mean anything.

I hope that in the near future we change our attitude and open our minds here in the U.S.

Otherwise, we are going to fall far behind the rest of the world.

When this country started, it was envisioned by learned men who were world-wise.
They all spoke several languages, knew what was going on in the world, and were men of science...NOT religion.

There isn't any reason that in the year 2014, the average American can only speak English. And has never traveled out of their own state....much less country. And we aren't given any pertinent information about what is going on in the world.

Just look at 9-11.
Most of us were shocked! We had no idea WHY anybody would hate our country.

I guess that's the way our govt. likes to keep us: Ignorant of the shit they are doing around the world.

These *facts* were supplied by the most unbiased or organisations....

https://www.cia.gov/library/publicat...elds/2103.html

Yes, American's a probably the most poorly educated of the so-called 1st world countries.

Sadly most American's are fine with it. Have no desire to know anything more than the price of a gallon of gas and what's for dinner that night.

IQ is not about Knowledge, it's about intelligence, not the ability to gain knowledge. It has nothing to do with Knowledge.

Mental age / Chronological age = Intelligence Quotient

The ability to gain knowledge would be aptitude or ability to learn

A priori... intelligence has nothing to do with anything...

A-posteriori... intelligence has everything to do with the ability to gain knowledge.
The ability to learn has everything to do with intelligence. Learning has everything to do with knowledge.

Never said Americans didnt invent ANYTHING. Of course they did, now, what about all the shit that WASNT invented by Americans? Seriously, what a fucking retarded argument. The post I quoted, and then corrected, was wrong. Simple as that. My post was a correction and now you want to get into a pissing match? Also, you'll have noted that I differentiated between the first programmable computer and the first MODERN computer. Don't cherry pick.

Also, Dylan Lehrke is dead fucking wrong. America vs the entire WORLD? are you serious? you'd be wiped off the map in seconds. Unfortunately so would much of the rest of the world, but the USA would be a smoking hole in the ground. Dylan is fucking kidding himself.

Lastly, Robbbie is spot on. There is a perception in most of the Western World of Americans as being trigger happy, gung ho idiots. The first two parts are spot on but the idiots bit I wouldnt agree with. Uneducated about the rest of the world, definitely. But not idiots. Its just part of the culture and the education system that you guys are very inward focused. From what I can see you guys are taught TONS about your own history, something which Australia, for one, lacks. We do not do anywhere near the amount of Australian history as you guys do American history. But we do spend a lot more time on the history and geography of the rest of the world. I spent some time in the US several years ago and was shocked by how little international stuff was on the news. Unless you guys are bombing it, or something amusing happened it seemed like nothing at all was going on anywhere else.

LOL, you are just making yourself look silly! I knew you was on a hiding to nothing when you though that the car was an American invention (I mean, really??!!!) but please, look up on what you are saying before you post. at least half of those inventions you mentioned are NOT American discoveries.

I'll help him with one. The Liquid Fuel Rocket:
"The idea of liquid rocket as understood in the modern context first appears in the book The Exploration of Cosmic Space by Means of Reaction Devices, by the Russian schoolteacher Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. This seminal treatise on astronautics was published in 1903, but was not distributed outside of Russia until years later, and Russian scientists paid little attention to it.

During the 19th century, the only known developer of liquid propellant rocket engine experiments was Peruvian scientist Pedro Paulet, who is considered one of the "fathers of aeronautics.". However, he did not publish his work. In 1927 he wrote a letter to a newspaper in Lima, claiming he had experimented with a liquid rocket engine while he was a student in Paris three decades earlier. Historians of early rocketry experiments, among them Max Valier and Willy Ley, have given differing amounts of credence to Paulet's report. Paulet described laboratory tests of, but did not claim to have launched a liquid rocket.

The first flight of a liquid-propellant rocket took place on March 16, 1926 at Auburn, Massachusetts, when American professor Dr. Robert H. Goddard launched a vehicle using liquid oxygen and gasoline as propellants. The rocket, which was dubbed "Nell", rose just 41 feet during a 2.5-second flight that ended in a cabbage field, but it was an important demonstration that liquid-fueled rockets were possible. Goddard proposed liquid propellants about fifteen years earlier and began to seriously experiment with them in 1921.

After Goddard's success, German engineers and scientists became enthralled with liquid fuel rockets and designed and built rockets, testing them in the early 1930s in a field near Berlin. This amateur rocket group, the VfR, included Wernher von Braun who became the head of the army research station that secretly built the V-2 rocket weapon for the Nazis. The German-Romanian Hermann Oberth published a book in 1922 suggesting the use of liquid propellants.

After World War II the American government and military finally seriously considered liquid-propellant rockets as weapons and began to fund work on them. The Soviet Union did likewise, and thus began the Space Race."

The education system in this country needs a full reboot. I agree, all kids should learn other languages. Whether we want it or not, today's kids are citizens of the world. With the internet and travel as modernized as it is many companies are now multi-national so knowing a second or third language will better prepare people to be competitive in today's marketplace.

Like you say, our leaders are hellbent on keeping us in the past. During the last election Rick Santorum was actually calling people with a college degree stuck up and praising those who chose to work hard instead of going to school (of course both he and his wife have law degrees). I have a friend who is completely pissed off about ATM machines offering multiple languages. I mock him about that being the thing he thinks is the major problem with this country. When you go to many other countries you see tons of signs in multiple languages and menus in multiple languages. It is just part of the culture yet here we freak out about it.

To me one of the dumb things we do in America is that we are often proud of our ignorance and that is sad.

Turn off your televisions and handpick your news sources.

Abraham lincoln wasn't multi-lingual, Teddy Roosevelt was and also orchestrated a revolution in panama to get control of the panama canal zone, primarily due to his hinging his presidential campaign on it and money, 10s of millions of dollars of money.

Points: being multi-lingual doesn't endear americans abroad, is no real validation of being dumb or not and even if someone does speak a foreign language America has been doing wtfever it wants to abroad for generations now. That's no secret.

Man, I'm impressed that the semi-coherent OP topic could generate so many rambling generalizations and guys pulling opinions out their ass depending on their preconceived stereotypes and agendas.

Innate ability, learned knowledge, educational infrastructure, education as a value in mass media & culture, etc, these are all different things and you can't just mash them all together like a lot of these posts are doing.

Regardless of silly terms like "dumbest", I do think ON AVERAGE in America relative to the rest of the developed world at least in the West:

1. There's far less coverage and interest in news & events abroad, and honestly a bit less curiosity about travel abroad too.

2. Less emphasis on learning foreign languages.

3. There's always been a sort of implied anti-intellectual streak, I think this is sort of a holdover from the colonial and Old West era - many of the original settlers were fringe groups & highly religious, suspicious about institutional learning, etc. This has kinda remained in the fabric of American society.

4. The rise of the Religious Right has seriously increased #3 here. As kane points out above, many on the right proudly point out their anti-intellectual credentials and certainly move to de-fund and de-emphasize education when possible. It's a real real ugly trend.

5. Mass culture all over the world is gradually dumbing down. This isn't unique to the USA, it's happening everywhere.

But America's a very large country and there are huge regional differences. The city I live in (same one as kane) I'd say *does* value education and travel and generally being aware of the rest of the world, and does have a more European sort of mindset. You could say the same thing about most cities in our region. Head down to Alabama though, and you'll see the points I made above out in full force.

Still, if the USA does continue down this path education-wise in a few generations we are going to be a very different spot on the world stage. And deservedly so.

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

I'm just not getting the foreign language requirement thing, if any language beyond english should be included as required curriculum it should be a programming language,
not some random foreign language just for the sake of it.

I mean, what, I'm supposed to learn french or italian or portuguese or arabic or japanese because why? I've traveled through a handful of non-english speaking countries so if I knew 1 extra language that means I would get to use it in 1 country for the 2 days I'm there.

I think it's needed so you can communicate with other people on their level.

I don't know about you...but I don't like feeling like a dumbass when the person I'm talking to is from another country and yet can speak fluent English. And there I stand unable to speak anything BUT English.

Maybe you don't give a shit. But to me, it made me realize that other countries have a more world view. Where we are more self-absorbed.

What are you talking about Limes? That was my first post - put down the gin! I didn't say the car. And which ones exactly above were of un-american provenance?

and just because some starved lunatic wrote some ramblings about it doesn't mean he invented it - look up "execution" the hardest pat of the idea chain. Plenty of lunatics jumped off cliffs because they thought they had invented flight. It took the Wright Bros (american) to actually get it going.

Imagining a thing or drawing it does not equal invention.

The Jade Rabbit is dead: Chinese mission controllers give up on Moon rover following mechanical problems


And this comes from your own newspaper .... Amigo.

Well, Spanish is the primary language in probably 20+ countries including most of the Western Hemisphere outside of USA & Canada. It's extremely helpful for me, YMMV depending on lifestyle & travels.

Others are going to become more & more important for business as the East becomes the new economic powerhouse - Mandarin, Hindi, etc.

But aside from "most bang for your buck" language-wise, learning a new language usually means you've gotten your brain out of its comfort zone. It actually helps you understand your *own* language better. You gain more knowledge about the culture you're studying, I'd argue you even get an understanding of the nuances of how that culture thinks. When taught to kids at a young age, a second language can help spark curiosity about other places that wouldn't be there otherwise.

In my experience, Americans who are multi-lingual are almost without exception more well-rounded & knowledgeable about the world outside their USA bubble than those who only speak English.

English isn't our language, it's England's. English is the most common spoken and used language in the Western world, that's why so many people know it. I'd wager if Americans had invented our own language, not near as many people would be able to communicate with it.

It's not a matter of not giving a shit. Maybe learning Spanish makes sense.

I can see how Spanish could provide value. If it were up to me and a language was required to get one's brain out of their comfort zoen and to evolve culture, then learning to read and write music would accomplish that in spades, combined with learning a musical instrument would very much accomplish expanding brain power and culturalization without having to specify a niche language/culture that one may never come across.

If you think about it, there are, what, maybe 4 primary languages- english, spanish, mandarin, arabic or hindu.

To learn all of those is too much, to pick 1 more than native English is too refined. most will never ever use it enough to maintain it. Again, maybe spanish makes sense as the 2nd language. But that's only due to our proximity to Mexico and the number of Mexicans in the USA.

Not quite sure where your reply is going. :)

Anyway, I wish I had learned at least 3 other languages as a child. I don't like what the American education system left me with.

I'd have rather been learning Spanish, Russian, French, etc. than being taught every word of every branch of the military's "fight song" as a kid. :( (and I can STILL remember every word over 45 years later...what a waste that was)

You're off base on that. Go to Amsterdam. All the Dutch webmasters on GFY can speak Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, etc.

They not only learned it...but they use it. It's not impossible. It's not even hard IF we had been taught as children.
Now? No way. Too old with too much going on.

But maybe you and I could split the cost and get that "Rosetta Stone" software and try it anyway? lol

No where in particular. Just trying to understand your view of needing to know a foreign language. I don't graspt the reason of "because foreigners know English." I learned french in high school, took 3 full years of it. Many years later I finally got to go to France and none of my education helped me converse in french. Because I didn't continue to practice/learn the language in-between those times.

I also hopscotched across Europe, hitting a handfull of countries, all using their own languages.

Woot! My state is Ireland. . . I have good beer and good whiskey!

Perhaps I am off on that, I would bet they know those languages due to their proximity to people and places where those are used frequently. I dont' see how someone can maintain a foreign language comprehension if it's not used.

I'd be up for learning Czech and Russian!