Here's a tweet from constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe:
Mass public ignorance is the predictable result of inadequate elementary and secondary education. An ignorant populace is ripe for manipulation by despots. We reap what we sow.https://t.co/8pvhMqTApw
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) January 2, 2022
Tribe is mostly writing about January 6 and the decline of democracy in the US, but in this tweet he repeats the hoary old claim that modern education is terrible and produces legions of ignorant citizens. But where's the evidence for that?
I'm not talking about high school kids here. I'm talking about voters. Is there any evidence that, say, the average 40-year-old today is any more ignorant than the average 40-year-old of the 1950s? Or the 1920s?
Contra Tribe, we're certainly better educated. Both high school and college completion rates are higher than they used to be. The education of people of color is far better. The Flynn Effect suggests that we're smarter. We have access to more news in a wide variety of formats. And research suggests that belief in extreme political positions is more common among those with more education, not less. It certainly wasn't a dullard population that led to the Third Reich.
Normally this might not matter. It would just be a continuation of my annoyance with people who suggest without evidence that we're all dumber than we used to be. But it's dangerous right now because it sets us on a pointless course of action. The answer to Donald Trump and January 6 isn't more civics classes. The answer is to fight down the highly educated folks who are very deliberately stoking the fires of anti-democracy. That means Fox News, Republican leaders, and the conservative media ecosystem. These folks all have college degrees and know precisely what they're doing.
Forget civics education. These are the real enemies.
Although I like and admire Larry Tribe, I have to agree with this. There's a difference between being educated and being informed. I am old enough that I had to study Civics in elementary school, but I can't imagine that it would have protected me from disinformation of the Fox News variety. In fact, it might have made me even more gullible.
If you are fed faux news 24/7 in every place with tee vee, you become addicted. I lived in Kansas for 5 years and there wasn't a home or business that didn't have faux tuned in. Blew me away.
Heysus is 100% correct. And it goes on the other side, too. One of our best friends went down the far-left rabbit hole. He is very intelligent and well-educated, but he only reads the loons....
Agree. In fact as I wrote below I think it’s knowing just enough to be dangerous. The whole “run the government like a business” and Econ 101 truisms are a product of that.
Yes… enemies. That’s exactly right. Enemies. So enough with all this debate over child tax benefits and the rest of the nonsense. It’s all irrelevant. There is an enemy to beat… figuratively and literally.
The other stuff will have to wait.
The people who elected those idiots in congress like green and bobert won’t be bought off with a tax cut. They must have their “you know what” cut off.
You aren’t ready for that yet, but the day will come when it is required.
No, I don't know what.
I have always wished that faux news and yellow journalism could be banished to the trash heap, permanently. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen. Maybe it's time to begin jailing those making constant lies about the election etc.
Yeah it’s actually too much education and not enough at the same time. Enough to know a little about a lot so many things ring true, but not enough about critical thinking.
***************VERY OFF TOPIC**************
Washington DC had a good snowfall today. Half a million people are now without power.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers lead by Ted Cruz will be flying to Cancun to study how the Mexican government keeps their power grid on.
Wrong. They're on an emergency flight to Florida to find the missing DeSantis. Including equipment to extricate him from Trump's backside.
The snow fall was so good it broke my 19 year old baby snowblower. Alas it also broke the 30 year old holly tree in the backyard, it could not take the weight of the snow and sheered off in three parts. Thankfully not on the house or garden shed.
People may be highly educated, but with critical thinking skills, it's not much use. Back in the day it was called common sense. I had parents who talked back to the TV ads when they promised beauty or happiness, scoffing or simply saying "Bullshit".
Old movies made for literate audiences helped too. How many freethinkers were created by "Inherit The Wind"? At one point Brady is being questioned by Drummond about the creation story, and points out that if God hadn't made the Sun yet, how long was a day? In that silence, you heard your mind being opened.
The military guys think the civics thing is an issue too.
The military guys don’t do civics. If they did, they wouldn’t do 90% of what they do.
"It certainly wasn't a dullard population that led to the Third Reich."
No kidding! Same with the Bolsheviks, the French Revolution, Al Qaida, the Khmer Rouge, Shining Path, or, for that matter, Ted Kaczynski! All of those guys were very well educated, cream-of-the-crop, generally privileged intellectuals.
Some of their "fellow travelers" and "useful idiots" might have been dull as a wax razor but they weren't the ones calling the shots.
No, we are not dumber than we used to be. But we are dumber than I thought we were.
Its always been there. But now, social media is acting as an amplifier for dumbness. There is something called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is "a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge".
Dumb people are not smart enough to recognize their lack of knowledge, and now have a way to connect up with other dumb people who will reinforce their ignorance.
It's a bit more perverse than that.
People with some degree of success (or inherited privilege, which many people will view as the same thing as success) or some degree of competence will think that they are suddenly far more competent than they are in other areas.
It seems to me that people who are actually good at or smart in one area are more likely to fall victim to Dunning-Kruger and stick to their guns/double down, rather than actual idiots doing so.
Many (most?) Germans supported the third reich because they were able to believe in a nonsensical “stab in the back” theory that the Germans had actually won WWI, only to have the liberals steal the victory. All too similar to what Trump supporters believe today.
I should mention that Trump supporters reject this view of history. They maintain Hitler seized power by forcing people to wear cloth face masks, which rendered them docile and controllable.
Also, he took away their guns.
We won the Cold War.
Without an existential threat, one that could be immediate and one that everyone sees, we have trouble pulling together. We couldn't entertain extremism without potentially serous consequences. Today, even in the face of a pandemic, asking people to wear masks is considered a threat to freedom by some.
What's that phrase about going to trial....from GoodReads:
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”
― Carl Sandburg
The Republican party can only pound the table and yell...
It's not ignorance, it's willful ignorance, combined with arrogance, belligerence, and a drive to dominate those with whom you disagree, and those you disdain for ideological or cultural (read racial) reasons.
Has nothing to do with education.
"Willful ignorance" is the phrase I've used a lot. It's just being loud & threatening to disparage & intimidate your more civilized opponent. Wish that they weren't allowed to use the name of Lincoln's party, since they honor those who were his enemies.
But then those who point out the apparent education level of the instigators are also correct; look at Kennedy, representing Louisiana as if his education ended early in his life.
> he repeats the hoary old claim that modern education is terrible and produces legions of ignorant citizens. But where's the evidence for that? ... I'm not talking about high school kids here. I'm talking about voters. Is there any evidence that, say, the average 40-year-old today is any more ignorant than the average 40-year-old of the 1950s? Or the 1920s?
* Modern education can be both terrible and not worse than education in years past.
* The evidence is Trump being elected president and January 6th. And Fox News. And evangelical fundamentalist Christianity.
47% of the population thinks it is so okay to disrespect woman and other fellow citizens that doing so doesn't disqualify one from being president. When you read the things that Trump supporters write, the ignorance and poor education comes through loud and clear.
Genetics: In humans, the traits of high intelligence and good judgement are unlinked.
> The answer is to fight down the highly educated folks who are very deliberately stoking the fires of anti-democracy.
Yeah, instead of salting the earth to make it less fertile to corrupting ideas, we should throw our bodies in front of the tractors to see if that will slow them down.
I've been disagreeing with Kevin a lot lately, but not this time. The dissolution of our democratic republic began in earnest when right-wing political allegiance became a central business strategy: make money promoting it; use all the tools of Madison Avenue - and none of the code of conduct of journalism - to lock in your market. I.e., Fox News.
My two cents: Tribe is close to the truth. Our problem is that half the country is less intelligent than the other half, and -- Dunning-Kruger to the rescue -- don't think so. Let's call these folks "low IQ folks- or LIQF" to save some time... The LIQF are the people who decide elections, for better or worse. We rejoice when the morons vote with us, and despair when they're on the other side. But we fail to recognize the inescapable truth: They are morons. Frank Luntz knows this, and has been designing Republican strategy accordingly. With great success. So, rather than argue over civics classes (or how to scare Republican voters), we need to ask ourselves this: How do we convince the LIQF to vote for our side? (There are a great many LIQF who are very nice, kind, and decent people, and this is in no way intended as a slight or even an "I'm better than you are" kind of thing.)
Maybe we can just get the folks who sell all that homeopathic stuff to help out?
Sorry... I meant to replace every instance of "moron" with "LIQF" but failed, and this interface doesn't allow edits, so I have clearly identified myself as someone who overestimates his own abilities.
Correct. Correct. Correct.
If anyone wonders how correct, find a part of the Dem platform that is specifically aimed at idiots. Then ask yourself, why not?
The problem being that the last five years have proven there are way more Morons, LIQFs, and idiots out there than virtually all non-moron, non-LIQF, and non-idiots ever imagined in their worst nightmare.
I mean, we always figured the religious wackos were not very bright, but because some of them were legitimately faithful, we gave it a pass.
Current Americans may be well-educated, but in terms of civics and history they have much more to take in than we used to back in 1940's/50's.
The people who signed up for Jan 6 aren't deficient in civics education or critical thinking skills compared to the rest of the population, or compared to their grandparents' generation.
This isn't about smarts or education, it's about emotions.
This is a group of people who don't want to give up on their vision of what the United States is, and they are going to ignore and reinterpret whatever it takes to make their vision of reality match their desires.
Bingo.
I was listening to a public-radio discussion today (I think the program was 1-A) of January 6. One of the discussants noted the higher level of income and education among the participants in the Capitol attack, compared to the usual right-wing protestors/thugs, like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. This is a problem of motivations, not knowledge.
From 2018:
It goes on to say that only 19% of those 45 and under could pass the test. So yeah, civics education is an issue.
It is, but is there a differential in civics knowledge between Trump cultists and everyone else? Or is the difference the prevalence of racism, anti-intellectualism, and radical individualism?
I'm skeptical this has much to do with quality of elementary and secondary education, which is fairly wanting IMO relative to educating good citizens in rational and critical thinking.
Aside from that, what we're seeing is really more informed by Lippman and Cialdini, and we could teach high school students the basics of these two fields of thought in a "civics" class cycle (preferably all 4 years of high school, but even last 2 year would do).
Of course, critical thinking and logic should be taught throughout high school as well, and perhaps combined with math curriculum (keeping everything including algebra but phasing out inordinate focus on geometry/trigonometry except the absolute basics) for a couple of those years, and then Civics.
To elaborate on this, I look back on my high school education, with the life I live now, and the most obvious waste of my time was geometry and especially trigonometry, which can be avoided by all except the AP kids and even available as electives for the math-oriented kids (and also left to college).
Instead, I would keep the focus on algebra, while including the essential basics of geometry as a section (or two), and make a much larger effort to fold logic and real-world statistics into the math class enterprise. What we would be teaching is practical mathematics, since 98% of your high school students will never need math for any other reason.
Then, say junior and senior year, roll in a Civics class that continues along the lines of logic and statistics, while including more focused critical thinking and persuasion subjects (persuasion where Cialdini comes in). This is where Lippman's ideas can be brought in as well.
To be clear, I'm talking about Lippman's diagnosis, not his proposed solutions, we don't need technocracy either, which would inevitably destroy democracy.
Insightful: https://www.vox.com/2018/8/9/17540448/walter-lippmann-democracy-trump-brexit
Back to the main topic, imagine Lippman updated for the social media age, with a significant percentage of population already "educated" about the "liberal mainstream media" via popular books and radio talk show hosts, and nothing that is happening is all that surprising, other than Donald Trump actually winning the presidency and becoming the leader of the Republican Party.
"Contra Tribe, we're certainly better educated."
I think you have to distinguish between the propagandists and the people they are shouting at. One thing that is undeniable is that the higher your education level, the more likely you are to be a Democrat. See here:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/07/a-deep-dive-into-party-affiliation/
If you are going to educate people about this, the best thing would be to stress the ways in which people can be manipulated into believing certain things. A sort of inoculation against this.
Most, if not all, of the people that believe these things think they are smarter than those who don't, and this is accomplished by using cynicism. Those fools on the liberal side "believe". I know to reject what the government and the media are saying because I'm cynical about them. But that's just another way to manipulate people; soften them up by making them feel they are smarter for seeing through everything, then feed them lies.
Educating more and more people to see through this as con-artist technique could help remove them from the susceptible pool and strengthen their ability to rescue others.
While I agree with the thrust of Kevin's comments here, I do think he is either misrepresenting what Tribe said or failing to quote enough of it.
The quote from Tribe shown here says nothing about education being worse now than it was. Or better. Kevin's suggestion that we're better educated now than 60 years ago is irrelevant, if we were and still are poorly educated. That's what the quote from Tribe says; there is no time frame specified, perhaps because he doesn't believe there is one of any importance. Personally, I don't. We were poorly educated then and we're poorly educated now.
A minor quibble, but ...
And if so or not, how did their education in civics differ, or not?
My daughter is taking civics in high school. It is a single semester, and ... elective.
For the anecdote files on average 40 year olds (adults at least):
Emphasis mine. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/11/republicans-once-supported-the-voting-rights-act-today-they-voted-against-its-restoration/ Someone who is presumably intimately involved in matters of civics implying the president can change the rules of the Senate.
From back in April of 2021: https://jabberwocking.com/most-americans-know-nothing-about-politics-nothing/
Well, we are at least better credentialed. Presumably. But in and of itself, higher completion rates mean only that, higher completion rates. You have to ass-u-me a constant curriculum (curricula?...) to conclude better educated from completion rates.
And on the topic of high school completion rates, from back in January of 2020:
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/01/how-are-our-high-schools-doing/ That post also presents NEAP scores. Could/should we use Reading as a proxy? If so, then ostensibly no, those completing high school are not better educated - those scores have remained flat. And are down a couple percent from the chart's starting point. Math is up, but does that serve as a better proxy? Unclear.