So, for no particular reason, I was thinking of a story regarding sentient beings – not people – evolving on a moon rather than a planet.

Because the planet has it’s own rotation around a star, and because the moon doesn’t match the speed of the orbit of the planet, life is very different. To become a sentient being on such a moon would mean first of all counting what we think of as days. Days of light. So they’d have to figure that out – which to this day we humans have gotten down to leap seconds, but generally speaking our society is off.

This got me to thinking about how the education system would evolve, and what I came up with is this idea that everyone dislikes education systems. The administrators want to change it, the teachers want to change it, the students want to change it. Then you have the smart ones who know how to improve the system, the average ones who like it as it is, and the stupid ones.

Now, the stupid ones aren’t necessarily stupid. They’re just interested in stuff that’s not in the average curriculum and/or their talents lay elsewhere and/or they just don’t like having stuff they don’t like to do, and/or they have trouble at home, and/or… well, you get the point. Some are just dumb, too. The trouble is that the educational system doesn’t know the difference, so they’re all treated as stupid in society. That’s their lot in life. No bachelor’s degree? Clearly stupid.

So now these sentient beings came up with a political system that is best described as democracy, except these beings don’t get elected. It’s accepted in society that every group of 7, out of the 7, they decide one who will represent them. Now when those 7 get together, they do the same and form a new tier. So as the population grew, they gained quite a few tiers, and when the number wasn’t divisible by 7, 7 to the power of x people were excluded and they had no process for that. Messy. Like Democracy, but not binary.

The top tier of less than 7 made the decisions. This caused a few problems with population booms because the beings hated the deadlocks of even numbers, and that rare occasion when beings stopped having kids when they did not want to create another tier. Very much interested in 7, these beings.

So anyway, when it came to the education system, this odd democratic-like… system… would decide what changes to listen to, etc, and they were made up of – you guessed it! – the smart, the average, and the stupid (as explained).

What I didn’t explain was all the problems with being ‘stupid’ were the same with ‘smart’ and ‘average’. There were some absolutely stupid people who snuck into the smart and average brackets.

So these people, who were somewhere between smart and stupid, and who were really somewhere else between smart and stupid based on the education system, would listen to educators and administrators that had the same issue… and they made adjustments to the system.

If the true intelligence of this was high, the system would eventually improve.

If the true intelligence of this was low, the system would devolve.

Since it’s a mix, it’s more complicated, so we talk about the average true intelligence. Or you could call it true average. Whatever floats your boat. But then we get back to the above:

If the true average intelligence of this was high, the system would eventually improve.

If the true average intelligence of this was low, the system would devolve.

And then the true average shifts between generations. One stupid generation can do generations of evolution. Or a really smart generation could improve everything and they’d make large leaps.

Look how complicated education really is.