[Route66]

"Although our analysis suggests that incompetent individuals are unable to spot their poor performances themselves, one would have thought negative feedback would have been inevitable at some point in their academic career. So why had they not learned?
One reason is that people seldom receive negative feedback about their skills and abilities from others in everyday life."

Of course, this article was reluctant to place any blame on public education, but it basically proves that the direction we have taken in the schools and have been told to take in parenting is [surprise!] completely wrong. We have been told that self-esteem is everything for a child - so much so that you should not correct them or tell them something is wrong.

This article shows that people do not develop proper self-monitoring skills if they are never properly taught the material AND are never forced to compare right answers to wrong answers. This applies to social, moral and academic areas.

In addition, I just heard of a study a last week that concluded most criminals do NOT suffer from low self-esteem, but from artificially high self-esteem.

So if you wonder why there are so many more 'clueless' people in our society today, it's because modern public schooling techniques and modern parenting techniques - both based on flawed psychobabble - are turning them out by the millions.

The most frightening part is...after a couple more generations of this, there will be not be anyone left who knows they don't know.

[70times7]

Right on target.

And this is my fear with regard to the performance of our education system, and how those shortcomings are intertwined with other negative changes in our society. We have gone from an auditory to a visual society; replacing knowledge and reasoning skills with mind numbing amusement (take a moment and look up amusement).

Our leaders are forced to pander to our ignorance as a society [i.e.: incompetence] in order to take and hold office. Yet the ability to see that we are on a self-fueled power dive eludes the ever growing liberal ranks, as well as some "conservatives" who don't know why they are so.

[machman]

Exactly, this is what came to mind when reading this. The Self-esteem crapola from modern education.

In particular, work on overconfidence has shown that people are more miscalibrated when they face difficult tasks, ones for which they fail to possess the requisite knowledge, than they are for easy tasks, ones for which they do possess that knowledge ( Lichtenstein & Fischhoff, 1977 ). Our work replicates this point not by looking at properties of the task but at properties of the person. Whether the task is difficult because of the nature of the task or because the person is unskilled, the end result is a large degree of overconfidence.

The worst thing in the work place is to work with someone like this. They don't know squat about the job, but think they do. One of my favorite sayings is that the more I learn about something, the more I realize how little I really know about it.

[staytrue]

The lack of negative feedback in the US stems from a "kill the messenger" mentality. I have a high school friend who I am afraid to say anything to, because she takes any criticism harshly. She is a democrat of course.