It would be like Ferrari finishing last in a 21st Century car race and concluding that cars are going slower that they used to.
Though, in my opinion, education quality has gone down.
In France, 2010ish?, in my last year of high school (in one of the best parisian high school) there was a boy who couldn't read aloud a text without stumbling. I don't know if this would have happened in the past. But back then only 20k students reached that stage and now it's 200k.
edit: stumbling/stuttering
What would you think if I told you I graduated in the 1990s and I felt the same way? Where would that put you?
>there was a boy who couldn't read aloud a text without stumbling.
There could be other reasons for that, like fear of public speaking.
He didn't fear much. He was a bully.
In other words, he was 17 and couldn't read fluently. But he wasn't stupid. He was quite conscientious about his side business and bookkeeping.
ps: I stuttered when I was a child.
I've read and written in English everyday for 10 years. I just can't speak it. One day I realized most news article I read were only translations of other articles. So I decided to skip the middle man.
Is that your professional medical opinion?
Let us assume the answer is no for the sake of argument. Does that necessarily mean the quality of education has dropped? Not necessarily. It could mean that 30 years ago this boy would have failed to graduate.
This doesn't mean that the education was any better then, only that the requirements for graduation are lower now. The top and average students today might be leaving with better knowledge and skills than 30 years ago even if the very bottom looks "worse" because fewer people are pushed out entirely. Perhaps the value of the diploma itself diminishes as a result of this, but that doesn't mean the actual education has diminished.
Of course it's also very likely that there have always been people graduating like this.
https://theeconomyofmeaning.com/2015/11/12/new-study-shows-r...
It's like https://xkcd.com/603/, except White Hat is is wrong on most accounts.
"You arguments are wrong because Flynn effect, and if this one is reversed then your arguments are wrong just because."
Everybody these days is a eugenicist in that they all support the idea of helping pregnant women give birth to health children by ensuring they are well nourished and given good medical support. The section of 20th C. eugenics that is controversial is the part that suggests that one section of society should have more or less children.
Here's a recent and fairly pro-eugenics survey of all the results they could find showing a reduction in IQ:
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2016-dutton.pdf
And even they basically are only at the stage of saying "maybe there's a hidden trend, that's obscured by other trends moving in the opposite direction" (they think society becoming more abstract has caused a false rise in IQ, due to IQ tests measuring that socially taught facility with abstraction rather than raw intelligence, this may have disguised an actual drop in intelligence).
So maybe it does help to have a preconcieved cause to spot this hypothesised trend.
Regarding their hypothesis, it's kind of a philosophical question about whether you'd rather have a society full of uneducated bumpkins (not sure there is an english word for someone with raw intelligence but no education) with sharper reflex times or ability to discern colors, than a modern post-graduate who scores slightly worse on those tests but better on IQ. It's also somewhat unlikely that the former is going to be having less children than the latter, so they whole dysgenic thing seems to be on shakey ground.
Unless all the people I personally know are very unrepresentative of society in general I have a hard time believing that there is not a negative effect on IQ due to differential fertility.
"Young people in England are the most illiterate in the developed world with many students graduating with only a basic grasp of English and maths, an in-depth analysis by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has found. The OECD report rated English teenagers aged 16 to 19 the worst of 23 developed nations in literacy and 22nd of 23 in numeracy.
In contrast, pensioners or those close to retirement were among the highest-ranked of their age group."