To quote Carl Sagan: The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Yes of course they do. I imagine the stats would be similar in most countries. There are two types of conservatives:
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The uneducated/ignorant, they choose conservative ideology because they are confused by different people and are afraid of any change they can see happening.
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Those who have financial incentives. They know that their ideology is wrong and stupid, but they just don’t care. They are only interested in gains for themselves and their family and cronies. Also known as the “fuck you I’ve got mine” types.
Everyone else is just some combination of the two.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that both of those types would be against higher education. The uneducated/stupid are afraid of educated/intelligent people, and are confused when someone they know comes back from college changed from how they were when they left. The ones with a financial incentive are smart enough to know that education generally results in people becoming more left-leaning, and they also know that enough left-leaning people in a population can cause genuine political change – change that might hurt the bottom line of the rich – naturally they want to avoid that.
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I have to be honest this is honestly terrifying rather than being funny. It brings back memory of Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge and that regimes persecution of those perceived to be well-educated, from those who wore glasses to those who spoke foreign languages due them making an association with those things being a part of the Bourgeois.
these people are cancer.
“76 percent of conservative Republicans parrot whatever they’re told by conservative media.”
There, we just said the same thing.
Conservatives just like their myths about America, Race, and Gender more than learning the realities as they don’t align with their beliefs.
Really? Why? What is there reasoning?
This is speculation but:
Higher education is typically liberal leaning. Liberals tend to be less religious and far more free thinking.
Conservatives are far more religious and illiterate/less educated. Conservatism as it is now is a minority to progressive ideologies (frequently outvoted in populist polls).
To get more power they need more religious and less educated voters to sway with propaganda/media talking heads. Higher ups are certainly pushing the narrative of private education (run by unlicensed teachers; teaching selective conservative values in textbooks) and it’s parroted by every republican voter and their mothers.
An uneducated voter base will equally vote against their own interest. They just don’t know any better. I’ve seen relatives (grandma with Native American heritage vote republican; anti women’s rights/anti Native American rights/anti social programs) vote to harm themselves because fox told them to. Insanity.
Thank you for the explanation. This doesn’t really detail the reasoning as to why higher education is bad for America.
Higher education is not liberal leaving a priori. It’s just that acknowledging reality and facts, and even just some parts of scientific consensus, is completely incompatible with agreeing with anything the GOP does or says.
I suspect fear and uncertainty plays into it a lot too.
The world is changing quite quickly. Boomers got to live through the boom of the 70’s, and younger people keep being told about some fictional utopia of the “good old days.” Whatever they jobs they used to do are either automated or irrelevant now. The white cis male power dominance is eroding, and with it a lot of the social advantages they used to get for free are going away.
So, things are getting worse, and they’re scared and want to do something about it. The problem is, a lot of these people have a zero-sum mentality, where to improve their own standing, they must do so by harming someone else’s standing. The idea that things can be better for everyone with no one losing out just doesn’t exist there.
Obviously that’s not true, but if you try to convince them of that? Well, you’re just trying to trick them so that you can take from them. It’s an us vs. them mentality. And you surely don’t want your kids to join the enemy’s side, so you do your best to make sure they’re raised the “right” way. And if your side wants to harm you? Well, as long as the others are getting hurt more, it’s still a good thing, because now you’re getting ahead of the others.
I don’t think “higher education is typically liberal leaning” but rather as you learn more about the world, and how to think critically about it, you realize that most conservative ideals are not in the best interest of most people. They are actually in the interest of those already in power and/or with wealth.
It’s kind of like that saying that nothing removes prejudice faster than travel (or something like that, I’m paraphrasing from memory here).
Also, the whole “liberal indoctrination” of colleges is only a half truth. Do people who go to college come out more liberal? Yes, but not because the colleges are indoctrinating them.
Let’s say you’ve lived in a small town all your life. Everyone you know is pretty much the same. You know very few people who are different so stereotypes abound.
Then you go to college. You start meeting some of the people you had stereotypes of. They don’t match what you thought “those people” would be like. Your stereotypes break down and instead of thinking of them as some scary Other, you see them as actual people.
When you go home, everyone back at home hasn’t met the people you did. They make the bigoted, stereotype filled comments that you once would have echoed. Except, now those comments have faces attached to them for you so you object to them.
To your parents and the people in your small town, you’ve changed. They blame the college for “indoctrinating” you, but in reality it is just that you were exposed to different people and viewpoints.
