고등학교 영어Ⅰ (미래엔 김성연) 연계 글

Older people sometimes complain that the young cannot concentrate, while teenagers sometimes assume that their grandparents cannot keep up with a changing world. Judgments like these usually rest on a few memorable moments rather than on careful measurement. One long line of research has compared intelligence test scores across generations, and its results suggest that such judgments deserve a second look.

In 1987, James Flynn, a researcher at the University of Otago in New Zealand, published an analysis of test results collected by scholars in fourteen nations. Taken together, the findings revealed that average scores had climbed as each succeeding generation took the tests, with gains of five to twenty-five points in a single generation. Some of the largest gains appeared on tests designed to depend as little as possible on knowledge from any particular culture. In the Netherlands, the data pointed to environmental factors so powerful that they accounted for fifteen of the twenty points gained, although no one could yet name those factors. Flynn himself drew a cautious conclusion: the tests, he argued, measured not intelligence itself but something only loosely connected to it.

Researchers trying to explain why test scores rose so quickly have looked mainly at the conditions in which children grow up. Many of them believe that scores climbed as schooling grew longer and as nutrition and health improved. Even so, a large review in 2015 described the causes of the gains as still unclear.

The rise, now known as the Flynn effect, has not lasted everywhere: a 2018 paper written by two researchers in Oslo noted that the gains had slowed or even reversed in several countries. Those researchers, Bernt Bratsberg and Ole Rogeberg, examined military test scores of Norwegian men born from 1962 to 1991. As the birth years advanced, the average score first rose, then reached a turning point, and finally declined. The same rise, turning point, and decline appeared in comparisons of brothers born to the same parents. This result showed that the changes came from the environment rather than from a shift in which kinds of parents had children.

Such evidence gives good reason to pause before judging another generation. When two generations earn different scores, the gap says more about the worlds they grew up in than about the people themselves. As those worlds keep changing, scores may move again, yet no number will make one generation better than another.