The United States is the world’s strongest economy and contains more Nobel Prize winners by far than any other nation in the world, but is its population as intelligent as the populations of other nations? According to a report on Forbes at Ranked: The 25 Smartest Countries In The World, the American population ranks 4th in intelligence among all the nations of the world. How can this be?
The intelligence ranking of each nation was based on three factors: the number of Nobel Prize winners, the average IQ score for the population, and school achievement test scores. While the US led in Nobel Prize winners (368) by a huge margin, its population IQ of 100 is lower than 27 other nations. Furthermore, international studies like PISA and TIMSS have ranked American schools at 13th place.
By combining the scores on these three components, the study ranked the national populations by intelligence. The table below shows the rankings with Japan at the top and the US in 4th place.
The troubling fact for America is that the Nobel Prize rating in which it dominates is mainly a measure of the past. The population IQ is a measure of the present, and the quality of student achievement is a harbinger of the future. America is loosing its previous dominance as the intellectual leader in the world. This is also evident in the QS World University Rankings where Asian universities are emerging above Yale, Columbia, and Princeton. Asia is moving upward in the area of education and America is in a gradual descent. In international studies of student achievement at the highest levels, the top 5 nations were: Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan–all countries in Asia.
While Asia is dominating the International Mathematics Olympiads by nurturing their “best and brightest,” and making giant strides in AI technology and various areas of scientific research, American education is focussed on ideologies that promote equity rather than excellence. Subscribing to the belief that special programs for the mathematically gifted are elitist and/or racist, the California Department of Education, has drafted the Mathematics Framework for California Public Schools, K-12. The first chapter of that document asserts:
We reject ideas of natural gifts and talents…an important goal of this framework is to replace ideas of innate mathematics ‘talent’ and ‘giftedness’ with the recognition that every student is on a growth pathway…There is no cutoff determining when one child is ‘gifted’ and another is not.
If America wishes to retain its position as the world’s center of intellectual and economic development, it must pour substantial resources into upgrading the quality of its teaching staff, and the quality of its educational system. To do this, the educational community must first acknowledge the research indicating that there is such a thing as intellectual talent. Then, America must proceed to nurture its most gifted students, while providing high-quality programs for all others.
