There are people that could be a great soldier/servicemember that didn’t make it through high school. Some will flourish under a military environment that failed out of high school.
I don’t really like people assuming somebody that didn’t graduate high school are somehow inferior or stupid people. The issue is complicated.
So intelligence is important for military service but a person’s completion of high school isn’t an indication of low intelligence. They may have dropped out for any other reason. It’s entirely possible that they may flourish in the structured environment the military offers.
It’s fair to ask if the IQ test is a good measure of intelligence, or if it’s measuring something else. But in this context, it’s measuring something that is strongly correlated to success as a solider.
He was working for the Department of Agriculture, trying to get the Afghan farmers to grow saffron instead of poppy. He was a professor in agronomy and would help his students back home in the US with their assignments.
He had signed up for the US army and ended up serving in the Special Forces in Vietnam for 2 years. He dropped out of school when he was 13.
In my opinion, the military should be a second chance for a country’s citizens, who have for some reason slipped through the cracks.
Of course the military is the answer /s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragging
This comment just shows you to be ignorant and contrarian.
And recent research absolutely has shown that heavy cannabis usage in adolescence and early adulthood does have a clear association with an increased risk of developing psychosis and schizophrenia. Just because the war on drugs lied about the effects of less harmful drugs like cannabis doesn’t mean they can’t be hazardous to your health like any other substance.
Regarding heroin - one may not be particularly murderous while zonked out, but addiction can make people surprisingly aggressive.
I’d also like to add that the company-grade officers stuck in the mud alongside enlisted were less at fault for the needless deaths than the incompetent general staff or the political actors who got us and kept us over there in the first place. You might enj the novel “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes, a Marine infantry officer who served with distinction in Vietnam. Or you might prefer “Dereliction of Duty” by Lt General H.R. McMaster, a renowned commander of the GWOT era who wrote his PhD thesis on the failures of Westmoreland and the other generals who mangled Vietnam.
I think the original reason for requesting the high-school diploma is two fold. On one hand the person can come back and pick up where they left off, with a better chance of serving society. But maybe the more important one was that it lowered the chances of teens enlisting it the pit of desperation, seeing themselves as failures, with no other way out. Those may not be the people you really want because those may not be the people who really want you. This is the kind of deal that's hard to pull out of, and the Army would probably not want to be in the situation to have a wave of desperate teens realizing they just made a rash decision. The Army also doesn't want to be drained of new recruits, so here they are, taking what's on the table. It's a clear sign that young people are sending to the Army though.
You’re saying that the US military has issues and it may well have. I’m no expert on that. But I still believe that a person who has dropped out of high school has a lot to offer society. It seems like the US military is coming around to the same line of thinking, as long as the person passes the IQ test. I think that’s a reasonable compromise.
The program might fail but if we never try then we’ll never know.
The GT score is comprised of combinations of several different segments of the ASVAB of which the most important is applied arithmetic. Those are math problems in paragraph form that requires careful reading and multiple steps of very simple algebra like calculating pricing for a retail purchase and deduction of the coin denomination in return. The challenge there is just finishing the test because they, by design, do not provide enough time.
EDIT
I just want to point out that I did not become more intelligent as I got older. My ability to read and instantly formulate logic substantially improved as I got older through practice. Those, reading and logic, are skills and the performance improvement is permanent.
I’d argue that is more intelligent. People generally get smarter as they age (up to a point)
That’s why IQ is relative to your peers. A child with a high IQ may still not be as intelligent as an adult with an average IQ
In your average high school class of 30 people, the 4 stupidest would be rejected by the military on these grounds (assume the bottom 1/31 have such severe developmental difficulties they can't even attend a normal high school).
Doesn't that seem like quite a high bar?
About 10% of people are too cognitively challenged to positively contribute in the US Army even in the least mentally challenging roles.
At 80 - 85 IQ level person can typically read basic level. They gradate from schools and comprehend simple texts and sentences but may struggle with more complex language structures, vocabulary, and abstract concepts. People with reading disorders or other disorders should not be confused with low IQ.
In other words, this is how we end up with Idiocracy where a low IQ person becomes the smartest person in the world right under everyone’s nose.
So an 85 IQ person today is substantially more intelligent than an 85 IQ person in the Vietnam war. That said, the modern infantry man’s job is more complex. I would postulate that the job’s complexity has grown to keep pace with the Flynn effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#/media/File:Sunde...
No studies done in the US which is the cohort here.
The main reason early studies were in places like Scandinavia is that they have compulsory military enlistment alongside IQ tests, whose results are made available for research. Studies in places like the US came later, because simply getting a representative and comparable sample is non-trivial. There's also the cultural issue that studies on IQ are walking on eggshells in the US.
And it's not slight regressions. We've gone from gradually and consistently gaining IQ, to the current scenario where some studies [2] have shown declines as great as .29 standard deviation per decade. Meaning in 40 years we'd all be a whole standard deviation away from where the mean used to be. That is exceptionally disconcerting, particularly if it doesn't just flat-line at some point.
[1] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962...
[2] - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
Many failing students simply got passed through grade to grade.
If a high school diploma has no value as a signal, requiring it throws out eligible people for no reason whatsoever.
Schools are doing a piss-poor job of educating people. Only 20% of schools can muster a 70% proficiency score, with the vast majority being much worse.
What this indicates is a startlingly large number of students are receiving an education that holds no value whatsoever.
Further, as already mentioned by someone else, the military will still use its own test as a means to determine where to place a recruit.
A scoring system is only useful when comparing parts of the entire population. If the score is only used in the US, for example, then it's only really useful for comparing states relative to each other.
When looking at the entire population and saying US students only pass the US proficiency test 20% of the time, there's no relative comparison to look at. We could simply change the test or the scoring system if we wanted a higher or lower result in the population.
This seemed apparent to me when I was in school. I can't imagine it's changed much.
Either society isn't giving a prospective good parent the resources to achieve success. Any or many reasons exist; rent is too high, jobs got replaced by AI craze, only qualified for jobs that aren't valued at a living wage. If the parents do have the resources but still fail, society is at fault as the kids haven't been rehomed to other environments.
> it is society's fault
We can't step in and fix everything. Systems don't scale like that. There has to be individual responsibility.
> Either society isn't giving a prospective good parent the resources to achieve success
Some parents simply do not care.
> haven't been rehomed to other environments
There are already enough kids without parents. You'd be making the problem worse.
> jobs got replaced by AI craze
Hasn't even come close to happening yet.
Okay, a failing student is the fault of the parents. Now what?
Do you think parents want their children to fail? Failing children are generally associated with low socioeconomic status.
So, now, you have to fix low socioeconomic status. Now what?
etc.
You are correct that schools and teachers can only do so much. However, schools and teachers must also operate in the reality of what actually exists rather than what they would like.
People who did terribly in the context of a class rooom but thrive in the military in very complicated roles.
This recent interview with the commander of Delta Force comes to mind for me but what you’re describing is not rare. It cuts both ways like any organisation, there’s plenty of people who don’t thrive there as well but I’m not upset about this change at all, I think it’s sensible overall.
https://www.youtube.com/live/d_mI3XxiNec
You can listen to that person for just 5 minutes and see exactly what I’m referring to
The military does not only need highly functioning autonomous operators. There were many more menial positions in cleaning, catering, hauling and warm body canon fodder than there were scouts or special forces.
I guess these days many of those auxiliary functions are farmed out in very lucrative deals to select private companies.
With due respect for your country, which country you're talking about is highly relevant. There are <5 countries with militaries comparable in efficiency to the US military and only Israel is really soldier-per-soldier competitive. That's not a criticism of your country--your country likely spends its efforts on better things--but if we're talking about what's effective for a military, US military practices really are a reasonable gold standard.
That starts with the fact that the US doesn't do compulsory military service, because soldiers who don't want to be there aren't effective soldiers (note that Israel does do compulsory military service, which is because they have different problems than we do).
> The military does not only need highly functioning autonomous operators. There were many more menial positions in cleaning, catering, hauling and warm body canon fodder than there were scouts or special forces.
Thinking that "warm body cannon fodder" is something the military needs demonstrates a bit of a misconception on how modern militaries work.
Cleaning, catering, hauling, etc. need to be handled by high-functioning people as well, because in a warzone, attacks on things like cleanliness to reduce morale, or attacks on food and other supplies, are effective attacks.
All this is to say, that if the US military doesn't want low-IQ folks, there are good reasons for that.
While the security concerns of certain countries have motivated compelled military service, I wonder if a side-effect is less division/greater intra-country tolerance? And would the U.S. benefit from instituting compelled military service, or perhaps, compelled national service, which doesn't necessarily entail holding a weapon.
Some cursory searching turned up this study from Brookings suggesting that it would. https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/nationa...
And here's a paper - more of an opinion piece - arguing against it: https://www.cato.org/testimony/mandatory-universal-national-...
I'm definitely ethically opposed to a draft, but it's a bit naive to think that the US has ethical values or even ever has.
Man, your Army Band really takes their Bach to the extreme.
It's not about whether they will be smart enough to learn; it's about the fact that they will have to be taught. There's no foundation to build on, there's no axiomatic knowledge we can rely on.
People who haven't graduated high school are inferior. They're not less human, but they are incontrovertibly less able.
Denying that might feel good, but society didn't mandate 10 years of public education for shits and giggles.
For people that didn’t graduate high school, being a moron typically was not a causal factor. Knowing how to write and do basic algebra is sufficient to bootstrap yourself to anywhere you want to go, and many people get an adequate foundation in that before they ever get to high school, never mind graduate.
Then there are folks like me. I dropped out of kindergarten. I didn't do any structured schooling until I was 16 when I passed a GED and ACT test then went to college for Computer Science and Physics. My GPA in college was 3.89 and I've been a highly competent software engineer for ~20 years. Nothing that I missed from high school has held me back in any significant way.
I didn't graduate from high school. I ran business groups, founded startups, exited, accumulated patents, and am usually considered articulate and capable.
Yes, the distribution of people who didn't graduate from high school are different from those who did. But you can measure the things you actually care about. High school education (or other educational attainment) is just one signal of a person's capability.
The vast majority of states require that you be at least 17, and often 18, before you can choose to stop with said education. Everyone the military is willing to accept on other fronts has the literal years spent in school that you speak of. If there is a gap, it's only on the order of a few months, if that.
Everyone I know who did not complete high School got within a year or two. Paradoxically, it was the smartest people I know who dropped out. None of our reasons were academic. A combination of social and financial
It really isn't years worth of useful knowledge, the military is capable of giving recruits the knowledge they need much more quickly, especially given the much more disciplined/controlled environment involved.
In a year you can teach kids who are a little behind enough to get them up to the min high school will teach them, but certainly not the most that high school will teach them if they want it.
Of course this overlooks what the minimum bar for a college is. At my college the lowest math they offered that wasn't considered remedial was calculus. That's a far cry from many community colleges where the lowest is alegebra. You definitely should have learned alegebra in high school and not knowing it definitely extends your timeline on certain disciplines.
The problem is, if you aren’t there on graduation day, you don’t get that proof of paper saying you know what you know. So before you go and put people down without context in their lives, you should be aware that there are dozens of reasons why someone who aced high school - didn’t get a diploma.
A flat tyre, or the flu, on graduation day doesn’t mean the last X years of your life have been wasted and you don’t get a diploma…
Granted the Army will have to work harder on average to train these people, but some learn better outside of the traditional classroom.
Did you serve in the military? I'm wondering what axiomatic knowledge taught in 12th or 11th grade, exactly, that you think military training depends on.
Axiomatic knowledge? Perhaps in maths and science. The rest is different in various countries, so surely cannot form some universal knowledge base.
And in maths/science, a typical high school or even non-technical medium-end college graduate has ~zero skills or knowledge, so that cannot be a factor either.
So they’re inferior because they didn’t receive some paper? What if they dropped out of last class?
k12 was created by industrialists who wanted obedient workers and well behaved citizens who won’t cause crime and instability in the ruling class’ assets.
School prepares workers, not the actual people changing the world.
Most high school grads will know more about how the mitochondria is the power of the cell, more so than know about taxes and personal finance. That’s by design.
I didn’t graduate from high school, and I completely disagree with you.
I learned more math as a teenager than most people ever do, learned two languages to fluency in my 20s, both in very different language families from my native one, and got into a nice software career in my 30s, first in Beijing and then in SF.
Why exactly am I “inferior”? Just because I didn’t choose to pursue the piece of paper that your world view dictates?
A high school diploma only signifies the individual was approved by the indoctrination of public education, unless you're the handful that had private or homeschooling which still doesn't mean much academically (see below).
Incidentally, in the US we have what's called the GED[1]. The GED can be taken at any time without any requirement for prior education, and passing the GED is equivalent to graduating high school.
So no, a high school education in the US does not represent "literally years of knowledge".[2]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Educational_Developmen...
[2]: I'm a GED graduate, and I can tell you its contents are roughly equivalent to elementary schooling in most other countries. I can also tell you that is what a high school diploma represents in the US, academic wise, because they are the same. If you can calculate 1+1=2 and speak basic English, you are an American high school graduate.
Edit: also worth noting, is that I know of people who have graduated high school who probably could not pass a GED. It is definitely possible in the right school to coast your way to graduation, even if you would not meet the normal expectations. So in those cases, a GED would be superior to a diploma. All of this I think indicates that high school diploma is becoming somewhat meaningless
People here who are judging people based on their high school accomplishments must be coming from a sheltered middle class background.
Shouldn't be surprising, in any group there will be a normal distribution. A person that didn't finish high school and succeeding isn't shocking, but falls way to the right of the distribution.
Of course they exist, but until you find one yourself one would think the same.
It won't work in places like Medicine or Army, where human lives are at stake.
There is a progression your have to work through to get to serious places, else bad things can happen to both you and many people around you.
I took it the opposite way. High schools are designed to provide a bare floor of knowledge a citizen should achieve. The top side may be extremely competitive, but the bar for passing high school is meant to be low.
Someone who can't pass that and doesn't have developmental issues likely have environmental issues to address. So having someone be exploited by the government to fight instead of improve that environment feels scummy.
I agree with your general point, but I don't know about high school per se.
I quit school at age 14, got my GED, and this was one of the best decisions I had ever made. I feel like there should be more options for people to leave the system early, once they've attained that bare floor of knowledge. (Which, for a sufficiently motivated child, could in all seriousness be at age 11 or 12. The GED test was laughably easy, and it still amazes me that people sit through four years of school for that.)
FWIW, the military frowned upon GEDs, often requiring a waiver, but allowed GED holders to enlist.
>the army can provide a stable employment and a community that has its issues but is likely less abusive than whatever home environment prevented them from graduating high school.
For such a student I feel it's out of the frying pan and into the fire. Now they are bound to the government for X years for everything, from a meager pay to living quarters (you also needed to look the way they told you to look, but I think they are relaxing those hair/tattoo codes a bit). You go where they tell you to go and do what they tell you to do. And "leaving your job" if it's not for you means you can be put at trial.
It's an awful lot of a gamble being taken here for someone who likely hasn't addressed their core traumas to begin with.
Hey, did our system utterly fail you? Submit yourself to us and we'll fix the problem we continue to propogate! You don't even need to complete the educational system we outlined anymore, just be a warm body to throw at future battles for oil.
There's less incentive to provide proper housing when you can instead put your citizens in barracks.
That's a bold claim. Can you back it up?
On the flip side, an actual path to citizenship is military service.
https://www.uscis.gov/military/naturalization-through-milita...
It's more of a spiritual gesture than some hard law. They aren't called "standardized tests" because they test for the exceptional.
I'm sure we can put the relevant education board in a room and have them argue over what should/shouldn't be on such tests, but the current result is a compromise after years of deliberation, being tweaked a little each year.
I'll be a bit more specific and say "high school testing is designed to provide a floor of knowledge a government feels its citizens should achieve" if that helps.
'Some' 'could' see that the ability of jumping the requirements of education is 'mostly' coincides with a certain level of mental abilities.
'Some' smart people do not participate in organized education and 'some' graduates regardless of modest abilities, but those are never arguments for the generic population and generic rules. Probably those passing a good(!) admission test 'could' understand that still...
"Some", "could", and "mostly" are words that people use when they're concerned with saying what's true, not when they have a weak argument. The facts are rarely absolutes and if you don't use qualifying words like that, what you're saying is rarely strictly true.
Yes, it can make your argument more strong, but you're lying if it doesn't cover 100% of the cases for the subject. For the lay person, this might be fine, they don't know, but for anyone who knows the subject matter in depth, chances are you sound like an idiot.
I'd argue this mentality plays a good part in making some social media so toxic. People generally aren't going to read detailed explanations on a topic, so people who would write them have less incentive, meanwhile some pop star's 10 word tweet over simplifying some complex global crisis, like you can just make it go away overnight, will get a million likes.
I don’t really see how they would he less trustworthy than a school board. Especially considering the stakes.
Where there is a need for personnel, there is some incentive to accept people who might not be ideal, but they are going to approach that in the most sane way possible.