Education and Modern Problems
It has sometimes occurred to me that some of the problems we read/hear about in the media can be described as failures of education. I am thinking here of first-world countries in which there is (what is believed to be) good, wide-spread education. Many people who have attended primary and secondary schools and perhaps college as well are rejecting elementary logic, statistics, scientific knowledge and lessons from history and instead clinging to superstition and conspiracy theories. These are comments about knowledge and belief but one could also make such comments about character.
Is this an inevitable aspect of the human condition, or is there some way for us to improve? Are we better or worse off in this regard than in the past?
Is this an inevitable aspect of the human condition, or is there some way for us to improve? Are we better or worse off in this regard than in the past?
Comments
Well, ITTWACW, so - yes (sin), yes (repentance and grace), no (to both - we're still human).
In response to Enoch: I stated that I am thinking of first-world countries.
ETA: this doesn't mean I think we ought to damn and blast people who have trouble with math, for instance; but it does mean that a failure to make the best effort one can, with one's God-given brain, is deserving of guilt and shame. As we have seen in recent politics.
It doesn't help that society is not structured to promote reason, rather it promotes ideology over reality. Politics, religion, economic theories and such, not to mention all the crack-pot theories; there are any number of things that people can grab onto and ignore plain, clear reality. And this is before one gets into the more complicated issues.
Huh?
Our school system in Australia I really know nothing about as I don't have kids, but people don't complain about it too much. It's kind of not really an issue here. There are the occasional spurts of culture wars, and apart from that the big beef is inequitable funding rather than quality of education, from what I hear. Private schools in Australia are not necessarily for the wealthy. There are many schools run by various religious institutions aimed not at the wealthy but at ordinary people who want a religious element to their kids education. The funding of such schools, together with the elite schools and government schools is fraught with political difficulty.
I don't think the openness to conspiracy is about education. I think its about tribe, and markers of belonging. I think radical racist and religious right wing politics (as distinct from New Right economics (aka thatcherism/reaganomics, neo liberalism, chicago school yadda yadda yadda) in the Anglosphere is fundamentally about white nationalism, and a reaction to the minor liberalisation of our societies in the 1960's and 70's. I think here the UK might be slightly different, as my impression is that there wasn't the material wealth in post-war Britain that there was in Australia and the United States. My knowledge of the economies of Canada and New Zealand is even less than my vague knowledge of 1950's Britain. Nevertheless, the historical documentary Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery suggests that there was at least a loosening of sexual mores in 1960's Britain.
What does that have to do with melons?
I did not have access to the mass of nonsnse that can be found on many internet sites.
Melon is sometimes used to refer to the cranium.
Such as ?
There are other reasons, of course, to fail to learn - I'm getting older and my brain is setting, and I was never that bright to start with. But I have taught several nice-but-very-dim folks over the years, and they are not the angry truth-deniers you are thinking about in the OP.
There's no evidence that I know of that suggests public education is any worse than it was one or two generations ago. We could argue the toss on specific subjects, but in general, doing well at school is now more important as it's ever been as every job worth having requires some level of academic achievement. Furthermore, there does not seem to be any bias towards youth in belief in conspiracy theories such as Qanon etc. Also I remember David Icke appearing on prime-time British television back in the early 90s. I can't think of any modern luminary that is any crazier than he was/is. That would suggest that if anyone is more susceptible to superstition and conspiracy theories, it's the older generations.
What's changed things is the Internet. Until then, it wasn't possible for the crazies to congregate together and affirm each other in their craziness.
I also think we have quite a separate phenomenon taking place in political parties (which is what I assume the opening post has in mind). They are the mainstay of Western democracies, indeed, to the extent that it is now a common belief that legislatures are undemocratic unless their seats are allocated according to parties' popularity. But the parties themselves have been hollowed out. Their numbers have plummeted to the extent that they are no longer big social movements full of average people of one sort or another. They are now the domain of the ambitious or the zealous, and that is reflected in the candidates for election they promote.
I think those average people of the past simply wouldn't have allowed the likes of Trump, Johnson, Berlusconi, Salvini - or indeed Corbyn or perhaps even Ardern - anywhere near top rank politics, ie people who although charismatic and perhaps good and sincere, are not heavyweight politicians. I suspect that there have always been plenty of voters who would have been willing to support such candidates if backed by a major political party.
Thank you, CamryOfTheApocalypse, for wakening me from the pleasant slumbers of retirement.
There was an argument going on in education in the 1980's which I think is relevant to this: should children be taught facts, or should we teach children how to process facts? The answer is, of course, both, but for some reason it turned into an EITHER/OR argument, and the facts approach, broadly speaking, won. Different subjects were affected in different ways. That we are still talking about 'subjects' in the UK rather than organising learning by different principles is one example of how the 'facts' side of the argument, I would suggest, won decisively.
The argument became politicised, when it didn't need to be. For example in my own specialism, History, the driving force of the so-called New History was a teachers' organisation which ended up being called The Schools History Project. They produced some very well resourced modules designed to be interesting to students such as 'The American West', 'The Arab-Israeli conflict', 'The Irish troubles' ... you can see why this was widely perceived as a Marxist plot. Meanwhile the tory Press insisted on a 'guns and drums' curriculum (which for some reason they regarded as more conducive to 'rigour').
SHP was designed, among other things, to address the problem raised in the OP. Students were taught how to deal with historical sources, detect bias, etc. - tools for life, and certainly tools to deal with Facebook even before it was invented. I would suggest that other education subjects in England could tell a similar story. The reason children were not introduced to critical thinking is that there was a conscious political decision to prevent this.
Well, about ten years ago Michael Gove as minister of education, specifically set out to destroy the influence of SHP. He simply ignored it. SHP teachers not among the history experts he consulted when he (and Dominic Cummings?) set out to write a new syllabus for teaching 4 - 16 year olds. At the end of the process one of the leading history luminaries he consulted described Mr Gove as an 'intellectual thug'. Mr Gove's curriculum was ultimately rejected because it did not cover the subject in an age-appropriate way, because it didn't start by looking at how children learn, just focused on 'what they needed to be taught'.
A missed opportunity, and it could have been different with a few more open minds.
That's a matter of opinion, not fact.
Empathy and kindness need to be taught from a young age, at home and in school. Even more importantly, they need to be shown to children, who will then grow up showing them to others.
And how much of the world view it engenders would survive contact with the archives of Hanslope Park.
Prejudices are learned at home. Home beats school nine times out of ten.
*Within local parameters. Parameters are often skewed by local politics, sometimes heavily
The UK also varies by locality, but not tot he extent the US does. Exactly.
Many of those in favour of "the facts" prefer to erase, or manipulate, the context needed to evaluate the facts.
How the facts are presented is part of how they are interpreted.
An example which sticks to me is his story of having a medical/dental procedure. The practitioner is highly educated and skilled, but knows very little of things outside their expert subject area, reads professional journal articles, and a few novels when on holiday. The description was of basic illiteracy about anything else.
I haven't connected this completely in my thoughts to the population without post-secondary education, except to note that some of the most knowledgeable people in my life have taken efforts to learn broadly and they have no post-sec.
In my experience, evil tends to rot the brain. People who are Up to No Good are not likely to be fastidious about their logic or using credible sources; when you want to put out something dodgy, any bullshit will do, as long as your audience is sufficiently gullible or self-seeking (and so the two sides, liar and lied-to, reinforce each other). Thus the intellectual laziness. Either they don't learn it in the first place, or they toss it out the window when it's really needed.
Formal education at its best forces students (for a short time, in a limited area) to do this shit whether they like it or not. So it is a public good. But of course, the minute you leave school, you can chuck it all out the window if you like. And if your school is crap, or if you choose not to pay attention in the first place, nothing can save you.
That last one is an important point. I remember an old schoolmate saying "They never taught us that in school" and I'm thinking "They most certainly did, and you were sitting two seats away from me."
"Evil makes you stupid" is how I've heard it expressed.
And the idea that people are 'fastidious about their logic or using credible sources' until they are corrupted by teh evilz ignores how the human brain works. Impulse, instinct and bias are design features of the brain. They are more primal and combat with our ability to reason. Brexit and the 2016 and 2020 elections are pretty solid evidence of this. Climate change denial, several (if not all) of the Dead Horse/Epiphanies issues are as well.
The idea of evil having an effect on our cognitive ability is an artefact of "The Fall" narrative. And it is unhelpful in understanding why people do what they do.
I guess we'd all like to think that our offspring are being educated in school to cope with the modern world. And one of the Skills involved is not taking all the information that's out there on the internet as being gospel truth. Knowing whom to trust. But maybe that's not skill so much as judgment, which only comes with experience ?
Teachers are only human, and there are fashionable theories in education the same as in any other field of endeavour.
When mine were in school, the prevailing fashion was not to teach them anything, but just to expect them to produce worthwhile work from their own inner creativity. Hopefully things have improved a bit since.
It's not hard to draw a connection between being brought up in that sort of system and people who'll believe whatever appeals to them.
Certainly what you describe bears no relation to what I have seen my children have experienced in primary and secondary education over the last twenty plus years, nor to what I have observed as a governor in another primary school - not the one my children attended.
This is trickier than it seems like it should be. A dear friend of mine some years ago taught math in community college to kids who were convinced that they were too dumb to learn it. He did things like explain that, in word problems, "of" meant "multiply" (three quarters of 16, etc.) Many of the kids really blossomed, often going on to take calculus and continue to success in higher education. It's not always easy to tell the difference between being uninterested and having an ancillary deficit that holds you back. The reluctance of people -- especially adolescents -- to look stupid in public only adds to the challenge.
That depends on what definition of great you are using.