They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly payout of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts and lucky amulets.
This is fictional evidence--are there real examples of otherwise unintelligent people being able to perform intricate calculations in specific domains? Most of the people I know who play the lottery don't think about the probabilities involved, which is probably why they're playing the lottery in the first place.
I disagree.
As a college student, I second shend's statement that high schoolers are lazy. It's one thing to engage students who are interested in their studies and enjoy thinking, but engaging the average high school student is much harder.
I do not know if this is strong enough evidence for you, but I offer the following text dump for consideration; from "The Predictive Value of IQ":
......Nuñes (formerly Carraher) has done a series of studies over the years investigating the mathematical skills of Brazilian street children (Carraher, Carraher, & Schliemann, 1985; Carraher, Carraher, & Schliemann, 1987; Nuñes, 1994; Nuñes, Schliemann, & Carraher, 1993). The example of Brazilian street children is an apt one for the illustration of the construct of practical intelligence,
In school we learn wonderful things like how to find integrals, solve equations, and how to calculate valence electrons of elements based on their atomic numbers. Because, obviously, they will be very important in our futures -- especially if we become artists, musicians, writers, actors, and business people.
We learn so much in school. Yet, when most people look at paintings they don’t truly understand them. When most people listen to music, they don’t really know what they’re hearing. Most people would fail simple music theory tests, even though many have listened to music most days of the week since they were babies!
Similarly, if you have working eyes, you should ask “Why do shadows look like they do? What color is snow, really? Can I predict the colors of different colored materials at different times of the day? If not, why? I have been seeing them for years, haven’t I?”
I think the problem here is that people can’t understand what is really important. Calculus, mechanical physics, chemistry, microiology, etc. are interesting to learn, perhaps. But, they are relatively advanced topics. People don’t use them in daily life unless they are professionals. Why not learn things that we think about every day instead of those that will frankly be useless to most?
Why don’t we learn how to understand our senses?
Learning about sight, sounds, thoughts, etc. should fit in somewhere in the first year of high school. Everyone needs to learn the physics of art and color (e.g. this and this), music theory, rationality, and logic.
For example, why should people start learning (or pretending to learn) philosophy, the art of thinking, in college? Should we be able to make life-changing decisions without even knowing how to spot errors in our thinking?
As a science researcher, I know first hand how hard it is to find a good balance between being well versed in worldly topics and being focused on a field in order to excel in it. But, both of these areas of study should not be called the true basics, in my opinion.
As president of my school's philosophy club, I took a different approach to teaching the basics of philosophy and thinking than traditional classes do. Instead of asking students to discuss the lives and ideas of famous Greek philosophers, I asked them to analyze their own lives and make their own philosophies. As expected, they were terrible at it at first. But, by the end of the year people began to actually think about the world around them.
So, my point is that we should -- in life and in school -- emphasize actual everyday thinking more.
The biggest challenge is that it takes so long!