We're learnding.
We're learnding.
164 comments
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Which means 54% cannot write a competent book report hitting the major plots and themes.
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And forget about picking up on allegories.
Lord of the Rings is a story about a long hike gone wrong. It has nothing to do with East/West dynamics, the question of power, masculinity, or the simple things of life.
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What are you talking about? That’s like saying Patrick Bateman, of American Psycho and Rules of Attraction, is not an aspirational alpha male figure!
/s
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In case you were wondering why we're losing our democracy to a felon rapist.
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Is this real? And what’s 6th grade for someone who isn’t American?
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Around 12 years old or so. I've been hearing something similar to this my whole life. I didn't understand how true it was until I started recruiting in 2009.
Not that it started with Bush, but after 'No Child Left Behind' act schools were incentivized so pass all students. They tied school funding to graduation rates and passing students. Teachers taught more just to the test and not comprehending the material.
I'm sure it's gotten worse COVID.
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In my high school they were passing people who were functionally illiterate to keep funding up. It was pretty much assumed those kids were a lost cause so they never got any extra help either. School would just look the other way as someone was lost in the cracks and passed on paper. The very rare ones that did manage to get extra help would take tests in a different room and it was well known the aids would just give them answers if they took too long. Everyone hated it especially the kids being passed through. They got ostracized for "having it easy" while also being frustrated they're spending all day being told to focus on stuff they don't understand and aren't getting real help with
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I think 6th grade is reading for plot. Just a basic plot with a few characters. No complex themes. No unreliable narrators. Limited vocabulary.
I found an online test for it somewhere and it was like
"Sally was born in Canada and lived there until she moved to the United States when she was thirteen. She spends summers in Canada with her aunt and uncle, but spends the rest of the year in Boston. This year, she's graduating from high school and planning on attending college. She wants to see more of the country, so her top picks for college are in California and Chicago."
"Where does Sally live during the winter?"
"Where did Sally spend her childhood?"
"Where do Sally's aunt and uncle live?"
You're not going to find as many people who read badly on a majority text platform like this.
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Not great. Sixth graders would be the 11-12 year old kids. It's been a while since I was in school(I'm 38) and when I was in sixth grade I was considered "advanced" in reading level due to reading Tolkien.
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34 here, 8th I was required to take German and Spanish. Small town Minnesota. It’s crazy to me this many are not educated. It does explain Trump though he’s probably in that category
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Sadly, yes. It is largely a consequence of two things: constant right-wing efforts to destroy public education and neoliberal profiteering. The first requires little explanation. The second is something that I only learned about because LeVar Burton (Geordie LaForge in Star Trek TNG) has produced a documentary on it and has been participating in activism to try to fix the damage.
Basically, with the neoliberal philosophy that profit is more important than anything else, education fell into the sights of profiteers. Through connections and back-room deals, schools have been forced to adopt proprietary "literacy" methods and tools that were initially developed explicitly to allow people with diminished cognitive capacity to somewhat function in society. This means that there's a whole generation that only learned how to do things like guess what a word is based on its shape, rather than understanding its phonetics or figuring out its meaning from its constituent roots.
This profiteering, as a side effect, also harms education overall as it has robbed people of their ability to engage in self-learning. Something that is only helping to cause further harm with people off-loading cognitive efforts to LLMs, and not having the skills to differentiate between when they spout pure bullshit and output something that is useful or factual.
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There are various rating systems, but it boils down to comprehension. 6th grade reading level is about the level to be able to follow the plot of Harry Potter.
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Good chance for me to learn, what would it be called in your country? What country are you from?
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About 11-12 years old. Educational standards should be a base understanding of simple novels and ability to write a basic page or two length essay on it. Math skills should be late arithmetic or early algebra. Or at least that's what I remember from the time.
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If they are using the data that has been perpetuating this for a while now, they don’t have a single source for the percentage given.
It does say NEW STUDY though, so I could be wrong.
I recently watched a YouTube video about this exact percentage, I’ll try to find it and link it.
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It took thirty years of cutting education spending but they are almost to a fully ignorant populace.
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We've even hit the point where they don't have to pretend to be pro education
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Wait another 30 years and all the 'educated' people who are running the country now will start dying off leaving behind the generation that had little, limited or no education.
Sure you're always going to have your best and brightest running the country .... but they're going to be severely outnumbered by an entire nation full of people who are dumb as bricks who raised children and grandchildren who are dumb as bricks.
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For us foreigners, 6th grade is around 10 / 11 years old?
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Yes, about. Ten years is peak reading for most Americans. And we wonder why they f-ck up the world.
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Yep. God help us.
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A little older. I was 11 in grade 6, but I was also the youngest student.
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I'm curious what it is for other countries so off to do a little searching....
Update:
Right, it's better but not wildly so when spread across the EU and lower in some places. This page is from the Irish Central Statistics office with 2023 numbers and puts us at 21% at or below the level 1 (at or below a grade 6 equivalent). On that page (2023 numbers) the US is at 28% so that 54% statistic in the OP smells a bit.
The main difference between Ireland and the US is that we're only 5% below level 1 where the US is at 12%.
For reference, Portugal has 15% below level 1.
Here's the definition of level 1:
Here's the relevant graph with all levels in picture format but you can get the individual numbers by going to the page and hovering over the individual levels.
Japan and the Nordics crushing it to nobody's surprise.
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This is pretty much all you need to know about the state of the United States. It's being run by 10 year old imbeciles.
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no, its being run by greedy, assholes, who know exactly what they're doing. The 10 year old imbeciles are their republican voters and the yes-men they hire to do their bidding.
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Yep, going to report this. It's not a meme .. it is actually fact and documentation for our eventual Idiocracy future.
Just kidding about the report of course.
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Op would be very upset if he could read this.
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If those Americans could read they'd be very upset about that!
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Can we fix that by abolishing the department of education?
It's only gonna get worse, isn't it?-
By design. Learndt particular individuals tend not to vote for Nazis.
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I'm not disagreeing with you (I don't know enough about the department's operations), but I can understand why people are unhappy with the ED (Department of Education). It has existed for almost 40 years, and has spent tens (sometimes hundreds) of billions of dollars annually.
The result: Well, most Americans' reading level, as highlighted in this post. Also, a shocking number of people can't even name a single country in Africa – a big continent with more than 50 countries to choose from. Also, college borrowers in the US owe ~$1.5 trillion to the ED.
Should the ED be abolished? Honestly, I'm way to ignorant to even make an educated guess. But after so many decades, hundreds of billions of dollars spent, and $trillions of debt owed by students, it doesn't seem unreasonable to think that something should at least change.
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What you're describing isn't really a failure of the education system. It's a reflection of the average American mindset. I was born in the US and grew up in the public school system. I loved math and science, and while I struggled with the rules of grammar, I still loved reading. I have always had a love of learning new things.
But most people aren’t like that. Not just in America, but across the world. A true love of learning is rare, and I think that’s because learning is hard. It requires humility, effort, and the being able to admit that one might be wrong. It means questioning long held beliefs and sometimes changing parts of yourself completely. That’s a deeply uncomfortable prospect and many people avoid it.
I think most people fall sleep while leaning on the third tier of Maslow’s pyramid (belonging and social identity.) The next level, where self-reflection and self-actualization begins, is hard to climb because it means hanging question marks on their long-held ideas and beliefs. They choose the safety of clinging to comfort and routine.
The current controversy over dismantling the US Department of Education is a complex issue that can’t be fully unpacked in a short reply on the internet. But in my view, what’s driving the American zeitgeist toward authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism is this resistance to growth and change. Internalizing new ideas means re-evaluating what you’ve always believed. For many, that feels like a threat. And instead of rising to meet the challenge, they'd rather pull everything down to their level, where they feel safe.
But, at least for me, the climb is worth it. Continuing to learn means accepting discomfort. It means growing past who you were in order to become someone better. It’s how we find purpose, empathy, and a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive.
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I saw that "3min read" tag on the screenshot and thought, "Not for 54% of American adults."
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TIL at least 46% of Americans can read.
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It's about 80% that can read. Only about 10% can understand the concept of a metaphor though.
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Republicans at work. A dumb electorate is the easiest to manipulate.
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To make it worse year by year the republicans continue to defund education, remove sciences, sex education and history from being taught in schools. While trying to force christian religion in public schools.
What a timeline America is going through.
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Also to sloppify all media.
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That's higher than I thought. Aren't newspapers written at around third or fourth grade levels?
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At this rate, in about a decade, tabloids will be formatted like comics with more pictures than words to make it easier for people
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God, no. Even tabloids are generally written at an 8th grade+ level.
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I had to look it up because of your comment. It's been over a decade since I dealt with anything in the AP Style Guide or adjacent. Fortunately, you are correct.
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There's some mentioning of things going downwards here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age, like simple machines for the masses where the buttons are moving pictograms of what happens when that thing is pressed... Where on the other side, there's nanomachines built by the educated.
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In healthcare, all of our education material for patients is at a 5th grade level.
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I mean, that's a whole different topic. Documents and info material everyone should have access to need to be inclusive so even your average Fox News viewer can read it.
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Well, reading and writing is a 6 millenia old technology, thus it's in dire need of replacement with AI readers /s
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For clarity: this is based on piaac test results. The literacy test results are sorted into 6 categories (1-5 and <1) for comparing the distribution internationally. 54% of Americans score less than 3, compared to top-scoring Japan and top-english-speaking Australia at approximately 35% and 45%. The task description for level 3:
Adults at Level 3 are able to construct meaning across larger chunks of text or perform multi-step operations in order to identify and formulate responses. They can identify, interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information, often employing varying levels of inferencing. They can combine various processes (accessing, understanding and evaluating) if required by the task . Adults at this level can compare and evaluate multiple pieces of information from the text(s) based on their relevance or credibility. Texts at this level are often dense or lengthy, including continuous, noncontinuous, mixed. Information may be distributed across multiple pages, sometimes arising from multiple sources that provide discrepant information. Understanding rhetorical structures and text signals becomes more central to successfully completing tasks, especially when dealing with complex digital texts that require navigation. The texts may include specific, possibly unfamiliar vocabulary and argumentative structures. Competing information is often present and sometimes salient, though no more than the target information. Tasks require the respondent to identify, interpret, or evaluate one or more pieces of information, and often require varying levels of inferencing. Tasks at Level 3 also often demand that the respondent disregard irrelevant or inappropriate text content to answer accurately. The most complex tasks at this level include lengthy or complex questions requiring the identification of multiple criteria, without clear guidance regarding what has to be done
I could not find which source originally cited level 2 as "6th grade" equivalent, though the oecd recommends against drawing that parallel.
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This reads like a description of the D&D PHB.
...is that why so many people think they get an extra attack when they do something other than an Attack action? Yes, that includes the Ready action. You get one hit if you ready an attack.
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I cast 5th level numeracy on the goblins, integrating them by parts.
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Hmmm so back in 6th grade when i would read the questions on the test and fond the answer to ome question in a different question on a different page was that level 3 reading?
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The podcast called Sold a Story talks about how the school systems adopted a curriculum that doesn't teach kids how to read. They are more like mimicking literacy. It gives appearances they they are reading but they aren't comprehending.
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If you want some light horror reading, check out /r/teachers.
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Yeah, we’ve noticed. Not that Europe is far behind I fear.
Literacy is definitely declining; people just don’t have the attention spans they used to. Between Twitter, TikTok and other brain rot, reading a book or simply a longer text just isn’t something a lot of people do.
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I've noticed that, when confronted with longer text, many people just use an LLM to summarize it now.
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Ugh, I’m sure to hate that.
Google recently put Gemini in gmail, which lets you one-click summarise an e-mail.
Most e-mails I get and send aren’t nearly long enough for them to need a summary. And if I send a long e-mail, it’s for a good fucking reason: it contains essential information.
I should probably build in some check - like a really random sentence to confuse an LLM - to make sure the recipient actually reads it.
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Who is that sexy mother fucker in the picture?
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you mean president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho?
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You forgot my title of Five Time Ultimate Smackdown Champion scro
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How do you test a reading level? Like for me it was always you either can read and understand or you can’t. What differentiates reading levels from grade to grade?
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Another comment here gives an example of how a 6th grade reading comprehension test could be formulated. Essentially, it's about how complex sentences you can parse, and how large your "context window" is while reading.
Imagine a small child just learning to read. They struggle with every word, so if a sentence grows more complex than "The dog is brown.", they simply can't get to the end of the sentence while still remembering what the start was about. This also applies at a higher level: Keeping track of a complex "scene" which describes a setting while also describing dialogue between characters and inner dialogue in parallel requires more cognitive effort than the simpler "scenes" in children's books. A higher reading level means you spend less cognitive effort reading and understanding the words and sentences, so you have more cognitive capacity in reserve to actually understand the full picture.
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Ah I see. That makes sense.
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Shit, is that why I can't understand fuck all in Finnegan's Wake?
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Did you start reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason the instant you learned to read?
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This might help. https://smcl.org/blogs/post/making-sense-of-reading-levels/
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In high school, I always thought the kids sounding out words like "the" were just taking the piss and doing it on purpose. I see now that was genuine. 😔
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Me Fail English? That's unpossible!
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And they all get votes
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As they should, literacy tests are subjective and designed to allow the proctor to pass or fail based of arbitrary personal biases
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Proctor, that's a butt-doctor, right?
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Not surprising h their president can hardly read
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Yeah we elected one in to the presidential office too
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You have entire corporations, nation-wide that are backed by religious nuts and racists, entire state-sized organizations of assholes paid from the bottom-up, and unless science and education has the same backing, we will lose.
When's the last time a rock band was labeled a "science band", but you can name four or five christian bands without even listening to them?
There are entire record companies and publishing houses that do nothing but spread more of it, interest groups in the billions of dollars that circulate faith and blindness. Even philanthropy, and a yelling preacher on every corner, sometimes across the street from one another, hospitals, nonprofits, foundations, you name it.
Christianity and Judaism is so overblown in support, we shouldn't expect anything less than absolute ignorance. Look what's pushing it.
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I mean math rock is a genre, in fairness
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Time to program something nasty and tricky or tweaking in a tight part: put on the math metal and figure it out.
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Science shouldn't be compared to religion. On one hand because the doctrine of non-overlapping magesteria which all religions should follow (it can be summed up as anything Science has a say in, religion shouldn't). But also like science shouldn't bother competing here. When science is treated as religion, it's often abused similarly. Its a method for understanding the world.
The fact that pv=nRT is provable and if I go and get rudimentary equipment to do this I can double check without any scientists present. Sure there are stories associated with science, but unlike in religion they aren't the stuff its made of. Science doesn't ask for praise or belief, it asks for skepticism, curiosity, and precision.
Edit: wait, does Muse's album "the second law" count as science rock? It slapped and was about thermodynamics to a certain degree
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When's the last time a rock band was labeled a "science band", but you can name four or five christian bands without even listening to them?
I feel like a pedant, but I'm sorry, the notion that most Americans can name five Christan bands/artists is bullshit. Maybe most Bible Belters can. Christian music gets the designation of "Christian music" because it is segregated away from everything else, listened to by a large, but still niche demographic who are already very religious, and treated as a joke by everyone else (including most non-Evangelical Christians.)
I can name two, Skillet and Red Jumpsuit Apparatus. The former is just the band I see mentioned to make jokes about Christian music, and the latter I saw on a show about one hit wonders (the hit is about domestic violence and doesn't even have faith based undertones.) If I start making exceptions like "became Christian after the height of their fame" (Kansas and Kanye West) or "stopped being Christian before they became known" (Katy Perry) I can get to five.
And on that note, what would a "science band" be? Like, a band that writes lyrics about new scientific discoveries? Yeah that'd have more in common with Nick Jr. than most music, secular or not. Most music deals with emotions in a way Christian music can but "science music" couldn't. The closest would be philosophy, but there's already a ton of music drawing on philosophy, and nobody segregates it from normal music because it's not music that only appeals to a specific demographic.
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Where exactly are the Jews advocating for cutting educational resources? Jews in general perform far better on educational metrics than most other groups, and their whole religion is based on reading, study, and debate.
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Honestly, people make more of this than it is. I say that as someone whoes reading level in the 8th grade was rated "post-High School" in tests. Though IIRC, that particular test wasn't considered accurate past a 10th grade reading level or so. Suffice it to say, though, I was always rated at least a few grade levels higher than my actual grade level when it comes to reading.
If you pick up examples of post-High School writing, you'll find it's hard to read. Basically, check any abstract on a paper for a technical field. It'll be full of field-specific jargon and long sentences. Copy and paste it into a writing assistant like Hemmingway, and it will scream at you to simplify the sentence structure.
Converting to terms of Lexile level, Fellowship of the Ring has a rating of 860L. By a conversion chart, we would expect 50% of students to be able to read it by the spring of 4th grade. Even the bottom 10% of students can read it by the beginning of 10th grade.
That's a relatively hard book; harder than what most fiction asks of you. Of Mice and Men, which is on plenty of High School reading lists, only has a Lexile level of 630L. Conversely, Romeo and Juliet can go up to 1260L (though this varies depending on the editing of different editions).
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Only 54%?
X to doubt.
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get out into the low income areas. if you spend a lot of time there, you'd probably be surprised to know the reading level is as high as it is.
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Yeah, no shit. gestures generally toward the DC area
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87.4% graduate high school, then people stop being forced to read books and those who never liked reading get out of practice
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I'm curious what you think graduating high school has to do with being able to read.
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It's the cut off point where folks generally stop being forced to read things more complex than IDK a Wendy's menu.
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I genuinely do not understand why people do not like reading. Im not a super nerd and only read a few books a year but I look at the hours i spent reading those books as some of the best entertainment i've had all year.
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It's a time commitment I'd rather fill with masturbation and videogames.
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Stop that! You and your logic, no logic allowed here, just hate
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This ain't a meme, Pug
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President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho is saddened
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The fact that some replies don't understand the title of the article and some are trying to explain it is funny af to me, I'm sorry 😂
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And 21% of American adults are illiterate
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That's good news! ... it means they're improving! USA! USA! USA!
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knew an old man who couldn't read. he could write phone numbers in a notebook and remembered who it was by where it was written. no names. Fort Worth 1980.
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Hot take but I think this article is hyperbole. Think about it. Half of adults are underachievers. That tracks with most metrics. Your average person is not smart. Intelligence follows a bell curve and it only makes sense that the bottom half is going to be terrible.
Edit: ok just realized this is the meme sub lol.
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It’s not hyperbole, this is an actual serious issue in America. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not have high enough reading skills to extrapolate and cross reference data from things like text books and journal articles. Something like 40% of American adults can’t read well enough to comprehend multi-step prompts (e.g. they struggle with stuff like bus schedules). About 15-20% of American adults can’t read at a basic level, very simple things like medicine bottles. Depending on the survey these numbers can vary a bit
Part of this statistic is because we have a high immigrant population that doesn’t speak English as their primary language but the main reason is that we’ve simply eroded education quality for decades. I work with teenagers who are in high school and can barely throw together a coherent email. Statistically, most adults don’t read for pleasure at all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
Look under “literacy rates” section
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Part of this statistic is because we have a high immigrant population that doesn’t speak English as their primary language.
Let's not blame the immigrants for this.
First, there is no official language of the US. Literacy tests can be administered in Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, or whatever language the subject predominantly uses.
Second, the US does not have unusually high ratio of immigrant. That's a lie that had been created by right-wing bigots. The US is about 14% immigrant, which is not unusual compared to European countries.
Anecdotally, most of the complete dipshits I know are born in the US. The people that manage to immigrate are the individuala who can read and write well enough to understand immigration documents (with the help of a lawyer), and have a decent chunk of money, or necessary skillset to sustain their finances in the US.
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“Terrible” is a threshold that can move, though. You can bang on about “half the world is below average” until you’re blue in the face but you will still always miss the point that the average should be much higher than it is and the spread should be nearly as wide. There will be a rough limit to intelligence at some point but the US, for all its resources and money, still seems more interested in finding the lower limit than the upper one.
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Thank you for pointing this out, and also for doing it in a politer way than I was able to above.
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Too bad they can’t read this article.
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I dare not find out what my reading level is, for the same reason I dare not find out what my IQ is. I don't gain anything by knowing it, and knowing that I'm stupid will only worsen my self-esteem issues.
I feel better assuming I'm roughly average for both measurements.
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Here is the thing... You can work on both of those. Literacy is not capped by your intelligence, unless you are exceptionally challenged, like mentally unfit to live by yourself challenged. You can read more books, and journal articles, and expand your reading ability.
IQ is mostly bullshit. The test can help identify if you have a disability, but it's relatively worthless for determining how intelligent you can actually be. You can practice pattern recognition and then take an IQ test, but all that means is that you are good at recognizing patterns. There are plenty of "High IQ" people who can't figure out basic shit, like how to put on a spare tire.
So don't feel bad if you don't score well on those tests. They only measure how you did one time on one test.
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Question what is considered 6th grade.
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It means you can read and understand the instructions on a pack of ramen but can't pick up on nuances, infer bias or apply any kind of abstract reasoning to a piece of text
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Question what is considered 6th grade.
This is a statement, telling the reader to consider, or be skeptical of, what the common understanding of what 6th grade is.
Question: what is considered 6th grade?
This asking the reader what most people think 6th grade is.
So, how did you read the comment? It isn't a question; it's a statement in both sense of the word.
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What is considered 6th grade level?
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That is nearly 114,250 9/11's worth of dumb people
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What's that in metric units?
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Nearly 17 Holocausts
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That's higher than I thought
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What does "6th graders" mean? After 6 years of total education, i.e. at age 12; or 6 years of high school, at age 16?
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Around age 12. Graduation from High School is at 12th grade in the USA.
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This is an oxymoron. Technically it's the 6th graders who read like adults, since specifying 54% of adults causes them to be the standard here.
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The adult reading level is not determined by what level most adults read at. The level most adults read at is the "mode". (At least iirc, median vs mode vs mean always gets me)
The adult reading level is determined by academics and whatnot. Im not sure if its just one org, NAAL for example, or if multiple orgs exist with varying definitions of adult level reading. But yea, the level of literacy an adult is expected to have with proper help or education is what they are talking about.
Don't get me wrong, you got the premise for a good joke or maybe even sitcom/movie tho.
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Damn this is pathetic. I had a 6th grade reading level in kindergarten.
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And were smarter than the average american.
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Easy, just take the elevator to the 7th floor/grade/level whatever you call it in Europe.
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What percentage are those guys in the photos?
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That is the smartest man in the world and the president
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164 comments
As much as I enjoyed Idiocracy when it came out, I wish its proposed answer/crux of the issue wasn’t “smart people should have kids” and instead focused on educating the ones that are already here/brought into this world.
People want easy solutions, like "Have more people be born smart" instead of hard, complex, realistic ones like "Put time, effort, and resources into robust education of the population in stable familial and social environments to develop higher averages of generally recognized metrics of intelligence in the general population"
There was already a precedent for all this. After the Second World War, American jumped right into the Cold War with the Russians and wanted to take the lead in science, technology, rocketry, space and engineering. They quickly realized that their country at the time was ill equiped and not well trained or educated for all this ... so they took the shortcut of using former Nazis to head their science and technology fields for a few years. Then to take up the slack, the government heavily invested in education and training to pump out the scientists, engineers and professionals they needed to gear up their technological war with the Soviets.
So the 50s, 60s, and 70s got filled with a lot of bright well trained, well educated and informed young people. They were able to power the American war machine but a side effect to all that was all these insightful young people became the backbone of a counter culture that fought against war, capitalism, inequality, conservatism and racism and supported black rights, Native rights, women's rights, minority rights, animal rights and environmentalism.
Then they had to bring in people like Reagan and Thatcher to reign in these counter culture movements and swing the pendulum back again. Once they defeated the Soviets in the Cold War, conservative America had all the incentive to break everything down again and dumb down the population until it was a just a compliant pulp that could elect a clown.
more like rich and powerful people want stupid masses
stop blaming these issues on individuals when the whole system is setup to fuck them into this mess
anymore than individuals can fix our plastics or fossil fuel issues
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought Idiocracy didn’t propose any solution at all. If I remember correctly, smart people not having kids was just a plot driver. Sadly, with the way things are that is how it’s gonna happen in our lifetime most likely. Education is getting worse over time, so the ones who’ll be able to educate their kids properly are those who are already educated.
Pretty sure the smart folks waited till they could provide for their kid well before finding out they couldn't even have any. Implying that even if they did that kid would have been outnumbered by the mass breeding of fuckwits who's only objective in life was rawdoggin after a good time.
It actually feels crazy that I know dudes who emulate the idiots from the beginning montage almost exactly. They didn't used to be that way, it ramped up the last couple years
Yeah, the problem with Idiocracy is that it over plays the role of genetics and doesn't differentiate between ignorance and stupidity.
Sure, genetics plays some role, but I've seen some very smart people that came from average parents and some very dumb people who came from smart parents.
Education plays a much bigger role than people give it credit for.
I feel like there are probably some very smart people out there who we don't know about because of their lack of educational opportunities.
Pretty much my whole life (I'm 51) Americans have been talking about how bad our education system is compared to much of the world, yet nothing substantial was done about it. I think the current state of affairs is a reflection of that fact.
I don't think that the movie was proposing that the issue or solution is eugenics based. I would argue that educated people are probably able provide a better education, and that uneducated parents are less likely to be able to provide their children with a quality education.
I don't specifically remember Idiocracy really going into depth about "passing good genes".
As unpopular this may be: With some, or probably some more, there are limits to what can be achieved with care and education.
Maybe, but those limits are extremely far from what we currently achieve....so there is that to consider.