The 0-point traitless character.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

It's convenient for your argument to merge together all education 'through' high school, perhaps, but it rather elides what happens in high school. If you're starting high school with Innumerate, you belong in a special education program. If you're not...they're going to try to teach you quite a bit of math.

That's because I didn't want to take the space to analyze the whole thing in detail. Note that I said "education through high school," not "education in high school." You do agree that most kindergarteners are Innumerate in the GURPS sense, right? That is, they can count and maybe add on their fingers, but they usually can't do arithmetic or geometry?

If you want to say that a lot of high school students are no worse than Math-Shy, I won't argue. Some of them get out that way, too. I remember tutoring a pleasant young woman who was taking accounting at a community college. I offered her an example that involved 10% of a million dollars. She said, "A hundred thousand?" I said no. She said, "A thousand?" At that point I asked her to do it on her calculator. To repeat, she was taking accounting. I actually rather liked her, but it was amazing how little number sense she had.

My view is that anything that's culturally defined as "general education" takes an IQ roll, not a skill roll. Or it takes a skill roll at default, at such a generous bonus that you could just call it an IQ roll. In the United States, the first two years of college are defined as general education, so that's where I draw the line.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I offered her an example that involved 10% of a million dollars. She said, "A hundred thousand?" I said no. She said, "A thousand?" At that point I asked her to do it on her calculator.

What answer did the calculator give?

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by whswhs

But if they don't overcome (Uneducated) in high school, they will reach 18 and (Minor) will turn into (Uneducated).

I will quibble (unnecessary digression that it is) that without a College education one is still treated as Social Stigma (Uneducated) by large swathes of society.

Though, admittedly, I'm not sure if that's Intolerance or Social Stigma and it may be below GURPS' resolution to determine (i suspect it's a little of both).

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

What answer did the calculator give?

If it wasn't 'one-hundred thousand', my calculator is full of lies.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by ErhnamDJ

What answer did the calculator give?

$10,000, because she punched it in correctly. Actually, what I asked for was 1%, not 10%, now that I think about it; that's why $100,000 was wrong. I've told the story from memory too many times, I guess. . . .

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

I will quibble (unnecesary digression that it is) that without a College education one is still treated as Social Stigma (Uneducated) bu large swathes of soicaty.

There are far too many people without college educations for it to be a general Social Stigma. Lacking a college education is probably a lack of Status, though it could also be said that some people have Intolerance on the subject. For that matter, it's possible to have Intolerance of people who didn't go to elite colleges.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by whswhs

Actually, what I asked for was 1%, not 10%

I figured that's what it was.

I agree with your point about schools not providing any meaningful training in any skills (except for the students who enroll in sports; they tend to receive all the training they can handle).

That matches both my own experience and my observations. Though I'm from the south, where the schools are notoriously poor. Anyone relying entirely on the school for their education would be lucky to come away proficient in reading, writing, and arithmetic. Those of us with parents who cared about our educations often found ourselves bored to tears--sometimes literally.

It was certainly possible for students without even basic reading, writing, or arithmetic to graduate. And this was many decades ago. Things have only gotten much worse since.

I don't, however, agree that these things should be IQ rolls. I think what's going on is that skills are being raised from very low to merely low. People are presumably born with skill levels of zero. To get up to a skill level of four or five or six requires some training. I think that's likely what's going on in schools. Children do learn how to write, if very poorly. They're going from a skill level of zero up to perhaps four or five. And it's the same with the other things they're learning. They might know what year the War of 1812 occurred (they might not), and be able to recite what they can remember of a memorized list of presidents. This is enough to raise their History skill level from zero to some other very low number.

I think the best way to understand this in GURPS terms is that they're gaining their default. Perhaps someone with a default skill level of three is only capable of division (maybe they aren't even able to remember how to do long division), whereas someone with a default of five is proficient in calculus.

[AlexanderHowl]

The majority of students have 10 in their attributes when they graduate, but they probably graduate high school with 50 points in skills. The problem is that Mathematics (Pure)-8 is just enough to get you into trouble and History (USA)-8 is only useful for trivia night after high school. The average student in the USA goes to 72 year-long classes over 12 years, though their rate of learning depends on the amount of money their community (or parents) spends on their education and their own individual capabilities.

For adults with an IQ 10, I think that a skill of 8 represents completing an elementary school education, a skill of 9 represents completing a middle school education, a skill of 10 represents completing a high school education, a skill of 11 represents completing an associate's degree, a skill of 12 represents completing a bachelor's degree, a skill of 13 represents completing a master's degree, and a skill of 14 represents completing a doctoral degree. Skill levels above 14 probably represents a decade of experience per level above 14, as they are not only improving their core skills. For example, the average academic will be improving one or two core skills, Administration, Diplomacy, Research, and Writing. A college professor with 40 years of experience probably has an 18 in all of their relevant skills, though I have known plenty that get along with lower levels in Writing (I am an editor at a journal right now, so the quality of writing can be quite horrible),

[TGLS]

The 0-point traitless character can be an ordinary person, if you aggressively apply stat-normalization and give generous task difficulty modifiers.

[ErhnamDJ]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

The average student in the USA goes to 72 year-long classes over 12 years

And if they're lucky in each of those classes they receive five hours of study toward a skill. And that's being very generous. Between third grade and eighth grade, I don't think we learned anything new in mathematics. Very little in English. And... approximately nothing in anything else.

When we finally did get to learning algebra, the pace of instruction was glacially slow. Approximately two-thirds of each class was spent going over the previous day's homework and the other third was the teacher attempting to explain things on the blackboard (in a way which hindered learning the material; if I didn't know any better, I would believe the purpose was to create confusion and make it impossible to learn).

Third grade to eighth grade was a colossal waste of time. I doubt there were even twenty hours of actual learning in those six years. And other than going through the motions of attempting to teach calculus and geometry, there was nothing more done beyond that point.

When I would compare what we were doing with some of the local private school students (who were attending a school which had a reputation for excellence and difficulty), I found out they were learning far less than us (literally nothing; in many of their classes, there wasn't even the pretense of learning).

I'm quite certain that everything we learned in those 72 year-long classes could be taught to a random hunter-gatherer pulled out of 50,000 BC in no more than six months. Assuming they could do four hours of learning each day before fatigue set in, six months seems more than reasonable. That's over seven hundred hours of learning. There's no way they manage to fit that much learning into a thirteen year stint the way they're teaching the children now. The vast, vast majority of time is wasted.

[edk926]

Plus the first month plus was devoted to re-teaching the stuff from the previous school year that was quickly forgotten over Summer break.