Thinking Citizen Blog — The Paradox of Education and Polarization — Wow!
Thinking Citizen Blog — Friday is Education and Education Policy Day
Today’s Topic — The Paradox of Education and Polarization — Wow!
One might hope that education would promote tolerance. Apparently not. Today. some excerpts from an article in last week’s Boston Globe Opinion section by Todd Washburn. Is this a problem that needs fixing or not? Is it true that “polarization in America is at a fever pitch and highly educated people on both sides of the spectrum make it worse’? Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
DO COLLEGE DEGREES CLOSE RATHER THAN OPEN THE MIND?
1. “Less than 10 percent of Americans held a college degree in the early 1960s. More than a third do today. So it is not surprising that there are more ideological Americans than there were a half a century ago.”
2. “The highly educated are more likely than others to hold consistently liberal or consistently conservative views across a wide range of issues. Even in the middle of the 20th century, when few Americans held an ideologically consistent set of political beliefs, the highly educated often did.”
3. “Thanks to increased mobility and the revolution wrought by electronic communication, Americans have increasingly sorted ourselves into geographic and online communities of people who share our lifestyles, values, and political beliefs.”
NB: “The highly educated have done so with particular vigor, clustering tightly around just a few urban centers, like Boston and San Francisco.”
THE COLLEGE EDUCATED HAVE BECOME MORE IDEOLOGICAL OVER TIME
1. “Between the 1980s and the early 2000s, ideological thinking barely rose among Americans without a college degree. But it soared among the college educated. Whereas just over a third of college-educated Americans held consistently liberal or conservative views on multiple issues in the 1980s, almost half did by 2004.”
2.The trend has not abated. A 2016 study by the Pew Research Center found that ideological polarization was driven heavily by Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher.”
3. Political polarization spills over into personal animosity. “But even when we look at feelings rather than issues, the highly educated still stand out, and not in a good way. Social psychologists P.J. Henry and Jaime Napier found that liberals and conservatives were more likely to dislike each other at every step up the educational ladder. Liberals with a high school diploma were less prejudiced against conservatives than those with some college, who were, in turn, less prejudiced than those with a college degree. The pattern was precisely the same for conservatives: Education increased political animosity.”
THE GREATER THE KNOWLEDGE THE GREATER THE FACTUAL DISTORTION!!!
1. Political scientists Douglas Ahler and Gaurav Sood found for instance, that a majority of Democrats believed that 44 percent of Republicans made more than $250,000 per year; only 2 percent do.”
2. “Similarly, a majority of Republicans thought that 43 percent of Democrats were union members; 10 percent are. The examples went on and on.”
3. “Then Ahler and Sood found something fascinating: Misperceptions were greatest among respondents with the most political knowledge.”
NB: The better your math skills, the more likely you would get an answer wrong if the answer conflicted with your political views.
SOLUTIONS: “more mixing, less sorting,” the map and the light metaphors
1. National service: “Mix young people from different social and cultural groups so that college-bound high schoolers from the golden suburbs of Boston and San Francisco and rural and non-college-bound young people serve alongside each other.”
2. Compulsory military service: “It has all the salutary characteristics of joint classroom activities and the added benefit that it imposes a shared identity on participants. Furthermore, it is intensive and long-lasting and involves shared sacrifice, which is among the most powerful of all human bonding agents.”
3. “Piercing the boundaries between opposing groups means humanizing both sides, which frees us to use the knowledge and skills we get from education not as artillery in an ideological battle of us versus them, but as map and light in the search for truth and mutual understanding.”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/08/04/opinion/us-vs-them-paradox-education/
https://www.britannica.com/story/pro-and-con-mandatory-national-service
THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED THEMATICALLY ARE AVAILABLE HERE:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
ATTACHMENTS BELOW:
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, 11/17/20
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned in the last week related to education or education policy. Or the coolest thought however half-baked you had. Or the coolest, most important thing you learned in your life related to education or education policy that the rest of us may have missed. Or just some random education-related fact that blew you away.
This is your chance to make some one’s day. Or to cement in your own mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply than otherwise about something that is dear to your heart.
