Word from the Dark Side – She Cries Your Name, schoolmasters' shame, IDF intel claim and the snake vs lizard evolutionary game

By Nikolai Vladivostok on June 22, 2024

A Theoretical "Case Against Education"

But there's a great survey of university students. Keeping in mind that this is a highly selected, extra-smart population, here are some data points:

85% know who wrote Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare)
56% know the biggest planet (Jupiter)
44% know who rode on horseback in 1775 to warn that the British were coming (Paul Revere)
33% know what organ produces insulin (pancreas)
31% know the capital of Russia (Moscow)
30% know who discovered the Theory of Relativity (Einstein)
19% know what mountain range contains Mt. Everest (Himalayas)
19% know who wrote 1984 (George Orwell)
16% know what word the raven says in Poe's "The Raven" ("Nevermore!")
10% know the captain's name in Moby Dick (Ahab)
7% know who discovered, in 1543, that the Earth orbits the sun (Copernicus)
4% know what Chinese religion was founded by Lao Tse (Taoism)
<1% know what city the general Hannibal was from (Carthage)

Remember, these are university students, so the average person's performance is worse.

Most of these are the kinds of facts that I would expect school to teach people. Some of them (eg the branches of government) are the foundations of whole subjects, facts that I would expect to get reviewed and built upon many times during a student's career. If most people don't remember them, there seems to be little hope that they remember basically anything from school. So what's school even doing?

Maybe school is why at least a majority of people know the very basics - like that the US won independence from Britain, or that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet? I'm not sure this is true. Here are some other questions that got approximately the same level of correct answers as "Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet":