Education Makes Liberals

The Washington Post this week had a front page, above-the-fold story with the headline Elitists, 'Crybabies,' and Junky degrees. The "problem" is that college tends to turn young people into liberals. A recent poll found that 58 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents believe colleges and universities have a negative effect “on the way things are going in the country.” This article represents the tip of the iceberg of the attack on education by conservatives, which has gone on for decades and is the movement's most pointed spearhead.

It is a hard point of view to explain without sounding stupid; well, they are advocating ignorance. The Post was able to find a local politician from Dragoon, Arizona, who would provide some quotes to a reporter.

I can remember as a young man sitting in an Anthropology lecture hall at Arizona State University, learning about the concept of ethnocentrism. If you are going to study another culture (which anthropologists do), you have to try to shake off your own society's assumptions and understand the target culture as the people see themselves. It is difficult but necessary to try to understand why they do the things they do, and believe what they believe. Having grown up in the (back then) small town of Phoenix, this whole concept was new to me. People have different ways of living. They aren't stupid, they're just different.

I didn't realize it at the time, but that moment of epiphany made me a liberal.

My studies taught me to see the different social groups of the world, including groups within my own country, as having ways of life that made sense from some point of view, even if I did not intuitively and instantly understand them. The concept did not only apply to exotic groups like !Kung bushmen and Australian aborigines, but to European and Mexican immigrants, local Indian tribes, jocks and hippies. I switched from thinking of out-groups as laughable and dumb to realizing they had their own kind of sense and reasons for being. My culture was one of many. I didn't appreciate it any less but the scientific perspective made it impossible to believe that our particular group had been singled out to be uniquely superior to all others. So there you have it: college made me a liberal.

And that is not to single out anthro. Any science has that effect on you, any study of the literature, religion, philosophy, or knowledge of other peoples. The student learns to stop seeing himself or herself and their own "way of life" at the center of the universe.

That is why conservatives don't like education. To be a conservative means to believe their own group's norms are truly better, realer, and more moral than other groups. No matter what kind of people they are -- defined by religion, ethnic group or anything else -- conservatism is the belief that their own way of life is special and good. It doesn't mean they try to change other groups, necessarily, but they regard them as something strange, ignorant, they assume other groups' beliefs are wrong and their intentions are bad. And education undermines that way of thinking. As you learn, as you become educated, you come to see your own place in the universe in a different and humbling way. You sometimes see the aphorism, "Truth has a liberal bias," and well, it's not a joke, that's just how it is. Education will make you a liberal.

You and I think of education as a good thing. People learn facts, they learn critical thinking, and they can make better decisions, do better things, accomplish more, they understand more things. The effect of education on our society has been amazing, just look around at the technology we have, the institutions that people have made, this is all based on the ability to reason objectively about the real world. But not everybody sees that as a plus; these same skills are a threat to traditional, tribal, parochial norms.

We have a President Trump because a lot of people are not educated and do not value knowledge. His presidency is defined by ethnocentrism, that is the concept that sums up his appeal and his decision-making; he stands for white Americans and that's that. There is no regard for higher values of ethics, reasoning, no respect for facts. When you let education slide this is what you get, the once-great United States of America is now like some third-world country, dysfunctional and petty. Trump's election is a consequence of bad education and his Presidency will ensure that American education in the future is even worse.