Does our society value education?

Great Debates
1

Spinning this conversation off from another thread, because I think it’s interesting, but I also think that @Fretful_Porpentine is right that this is a hijack…

Quotes of prior conversation that inspired this thread...

@Fretful_Porpentine, I think you and I are looking at the question of whether our society ‘values’ education or intelligence from two different perspectives.

You point out that wealth and health are correlated with education and intelligence, and that this is proof that our society ‘values’ education and intelligence - we reward the qualities we value, after all. However, I would argue that this shows that our ECONOMY and our REALITY reward education/intelligence, but our CULTURE does not. I recognize that the term ‘Society’ probably encapsulates both the economy and the culture, so that to me explains our disagreement; but I figure elaborating on that point is worth its own thread.

So… let’s address your point first. I concede that it is certainly true that our economy rewards intelligence and education, but this is not because we as a society think that those are awesome traits to have that should be encouraged in and of themselves. Rather, it is because people who are well educated are more productive at most tasks, especially tasks that relate to their field of education. This, of course, makes sense. If you are making your decisions based on how the world actually works you will attain better results, and someone who is educated is more likely to understand how the world works.

This also applies outside the economy. For example, studies have shown that high school dropouts are far more likely to die in car crashes than high school graduates, and in the US this is mostly attributed to people with better education having more resources and thus access to safer cars. That makes sense and undoubtedly is the source of most of the discrepancy, but a study from Malaysia of all places seems to imply that there might be something else going on too: compliance with seat belt rules is far higher among educated people than uneducated people.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Seat-belt-use-by-education-level-n187_tbl2_275552746

Now, clearly Malaysia is not the US, and I wasn’t able to find any similar studies from the US at a glance; however, it would not be particularly surprising if the less educated you are the less likely you are to wear a seatbelt. For example, I’ve met a (thankfully very small) number of people who refuse to wear a seatbelt because they believe that they don’t actually help - that you’re far better off being thrown clear of the car in a head-on collision than being strapped in, which could cause you to be trapped while the car burns, fills with smoke, or sinks into water. Of course, statistically we can show that while there may be individual cases where someone was saved by not wearing a seatbelt, wearing one makes you FAR MORE LIKELY to survive a crash in the vast majority of cases. The arguments against wearing seatbelts are all deeply, deeply flawed. And someone who is uneducated is much more likely to be unable to differentiate between a flawed argument and a statistically sound one, simply because they do not understand the statistics involved. And why would they? I minored in Statistics, so I’d like to think I have a pretty solid understanding of the topic, but that took work and study - in other words, education - it’s not like I was born instinctively understanding how statistics work. In fact, our instincts are TERRIBLE at statistical analysis.

So, my argument is this: the better outcomes we see for the well-educated come not from our society’s high regard for education, but rather because knowing stuff is JUST THAT USEFUL. Clearly education is practically valuable, otherwise I wouldn’t CARE if our society values it or not. So we’re in agreement there. But the question is - if education is so dang useful, why does our CULTURE treat it the way that it does?

I would argue that from a cultural perspective, America does not value education. The people we look up to most are wealthy, attractive, wealthy, athletic, or wealthy; certainly there are exceptions, cultural icons recognized specifically for their intelligence - people like Ben Franklin, or Thomas Edison, or Stephen Hawkins (though he’s not universally well-regarded, many people hated him). And many of the people who we supposedly value for their smarts, like Bill Gates or Elon Musk, I’d argue are actually valued for their wealth first, and for their intelligence only as a means for achieving that wealth.

I guess that brings up three questions for discussion in this thread:

  1. Do you agree or disagree that our society/culture does not value intelligence/education (except for possibly as a means of achieving wealth)?
  2. Do you agree or disagree that this is a bad thing that is having a negative impact on our society?
  3. What the heck can we do about it?
2

And if so, this may be because both education level and seatbelt wearing both correlate with some other variable, like conscientiousness or impulse control.

And, getting back to the question posed by the thread title, I think it may be that our society values some of the things that education correlates with (some of which have a causal connection, some of which don’t), but that we don’t value it all that much for its own sake.

3

Our society values education only to the extent that it doesn’t actually lead you to … think. Learning to think often requires you to deal with uncomfortable situations and that seems to be a no-no these days.

Even in math class, to learn anything useful, you have to be presented with a problem whose solution is not obvious. And that is uncomfortable.

4

Hmm, I’m not sure that I have enough time to give this thread the attention that it deserves (and I have a hard time articulating my own thoughts about some of this stuff), but it seems to me that if it were just a matter of education enabling people to make better life decisions, the gap in life expectancy would be generally consistent across generations – it wouldn’t be growing progressively wider.

Again, I find it a bit hard to articulate this, but it seems to me that we’re becoming a society that is increasingly stratified by educational attainment, where more and more of the tangible and intangible rewards in life are going to college-educated professionals. The fact that education isn’t glamorized in popular culture is beside the point – it’s become a prerequisite for having stability, respect, and a decently long and healthy life. I dunno, maybe that isn’t so much “valuing education” as “devaluing the uneducated,” but whatever it is, it’s happening and it makes me deeply uncomfortable.

5

The highly educated value education. The less educated often don’t. Think of how many people with a high school education or less who think they know more about medicine than a doctor or more about law than a lawyer.

6

This is certainly true. Obviously untangling the exact statistical impact that education level has from all possible confounding variables is basically impossible, as is the question of whether it is your education itself that is benefitting you or skills gained while attaining that education.

This I think raises an interesting question. Does it matter? Is education important/worthwhile in and of itself, or should it only be valued for whatever practical benefits it holds?

7

It seems to me that in our capitalist system, there is a very simple explanation for this. The US economy is growing, but it isn’t doing so equally across all sectors. The parts of our economy that require college educated employees have been growing, while the parts of our economy that do not have either been shrinking, getting offshored, or being automated. In other words, less and less of the total value of the goods and services produced in our economy is being produced by those who lack a college education, and in a capitalist system that means that less and less of the rewards for producing those goods and services will go to those workers.

Of course, this is exacerbated by the fact that in our PARTICULAR capitalist system, a higher and higher proportion of the wealth created by this increased production is going straight to the top anyways. So we are using an educated workforce to produce more, and a smaller proportion of the total profit is going to workers anyways. Total profit increases; the amount going to the business owners is increasing greatly; the amount going to the educated workforce is increasing somewhat; and the amount going to the uneducated workforce is plummeting.

Ahh, but therein lies the rub. People by and large aren’t making decisions on how to educate their children based on a cold, calculating analysis of potential outcomes 20 years down the line when that child enters the workforce. Children CERTAINLY don’t take that into consideration when deciding how much attention to pay in class. You are right, the way pop culture views education has little impact on how valuable education actually is; but I would argue it has a HUGE impact on people’s PERCEPTION of the value of education. Which is why, despite the greater and greater importance of education in our society, many people still choose not to value it, or not to instill an appreciation for it in the next generation.

8

I think you are right, for the most part, and I think that’s a big part of the cycle of poverty. I don’t blame an uneducated parent for not emphasizing their child’s education, because why would they? How are they supposed to know how important it is?

But even without assigning blame, and coming at this issue from a place of compassion and a hope that the next generation can do better than we did - what in the world do we DO about it?

9

I expect that you can look up how the US compares to other nations on academic tests.

The only case where that wouldn’t answer, factually, how important education is to us versus how important it is to people in other countries would be if you believed that the genetic pool in the US in inferior or superior to other nations.

So far as I’ve ever been able to tell, if you take two related groups of people (e.g., Syrians and Israelis, Hmong and Han, etc), you can usually find one who does well and another who is more lackluster, saying that the difference isn’t biological. At the moment, the indication would be that if you find a difference in scholastic importance, that is a cultural difference and given that progression along the scholastic pathway is significantly determined by success on standardized tests, the performance on standardized tests is a pretty hard metric on how strong that culture focuses on prioritizing education.

10

While you are at it, please compare the individual US states with each other. There will be less distortions due to language and such factors (I guess) and if significant differences show, they could be easier compared with other metrics (life expectancy, seat belt use, meat or fish consumption etc.) as the data should be more consistent.

11
  1. As with a growing wealth gap, there is growing education/intelligence gap. Dangerously high proportions of the population don’t know how to think critically, are afraid to admit they don’t know something, don’t even know how to find and recognize a factual answer (or whether one even exists), and would rather acquiesce to socio-political views they identify with than ask questions and challenge ideologies for fear of social bullying and risk ostracism from the group.
  2. I agree.
  3. Teach critical thinking and the value of empiricism.
12

I don’t think there’s any evidence that these sorts of differences are based on biology, but I also don’t think that your only two options are biology or cultural importance. There is a third option - access to education. It doesn’t matter how highly your culture values education if you live under an oppressive theocratic regime that bans all secular education, do example.

14

I feel like people respect the idea of education a lot more than the process. They don’t remember their own education as a bunch of things they learned, but rather as a bunch of assignments to turn in, a bunch of bullshit rules they didn’t want to follow, a bunch of unreasonable or sadistic adults they disliked. As for the actual things they learned, they don’t think of those as the product of education: they think they can write a paragraph, know the basic events of history, multiply numbers, understand a report about COVID on the news because those things are common sense and they think it is immutable. You can’t tell them they might be better at those things, had they a better education, because they see their “common sense” as something inherent. People with less common sense are stupid, not less educated. People with more are lucky to be so smart. In this mindset, any appreciation of advanced degrees sees the degrees as markers of “smartness”, not evidence that a persona has achieved a certain set of skills. And many people, many people with degrees, have the attitude that college itself is literally worthless, that they learned nothing, that it was just to “prove they had work ethic”. Which seems ridiculous to me. I learned a ton in college, and I went in as one of the “lucky smart ones”.

People value knowing things, but they often don’t really see formal education as the path to that. I believe it is, but we’ve structured our whole education system to be transactional and adversarial, which obscures it’s value.

15

You keep referring to “our culture” and “our society” as if that is one monolithic thing. Lots of people value education, and lots of others not so much. It depends whether the education is for them or for the other guy. If it’s for them, and they can succeed in getting it, they’re probably for it. If it’s for the other guy, they may see only the expense and not the value. Especially if the other guy is someone they don’t like.

16

From 2006:

Also,

More than 75 percent of students at two-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at four-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy. This means that they lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials.

Half of U.S. adults can’t read a book written at the 8th-grade level, according to the OECD. [4]

The average American reads at the 7th- to 8th-grade level, according to The Literacy Project. [5]

17

I think the question is a bit broad. Certain groups in our society value education, as a whole, some don’t as much. Though my father couldn’t go to college, being very poor in the Depression, it was understood that I would. Hell 3 out of 5 cousins got advanced degrees. I’d say it was a Jewish thing, but my wife who isn’t Jewish had parents with the same attitude.
On the other hand when the principal of my very upper middle class high school left, I was on a committee recommending things we’d like to see in a new principal. Support for sports. Support for sports. “Support for academics” I piped up. They looked at me like I was crazy. “Support for sports.”

18

Should they?

I would agree.
I would also say this did not used to be the case.

I agree somehwat. To your intelligence/education diad I would add a third leg of knowledge. This is also undervalued, but is not the same as the other two.

I agree

I’m not sure, but I think not making education a profit enterprise would help, as well as a return to more publicly-funded television.

This is not my experience, at least, here in South Africa - nobody celebrates a college graduation like the illiterate grandma from the rural village, and in general, education is seen as very valuable. But not in-and-of-itself, though.

Your solution to society not valuing education is … a particular piece of education? You don’t see the fundamental flaw in that plan?

19

After basic literacy skills are achieved, yes.

Not nearly as fundamental a flaw as “more publicly funded television” in an era of the interwebs.

20

There are other things to address in the thread which I will come back to shortly, but I gotta address this bit - I’m on board with BOTH of you, because PBS is funding some fantastic education content on YouTube, like Eons and Spacetime (as well as lots more that isn’t up my particular alley but which I’ve been meaning to check out). So I’m all for more public funding for educational content, though I agree broadcasting this over the intertoobz will be better than using TV

21

I feel like in some ways what we are seeing these days is a crisis in critical thinking, because “critical thinking” often takes the form of “intense skepticism” mixed with a general distrust of institutions. Convince a generally uneducated person to approach everything critically, you get anti-vaxxers and Flat Earthers and Schools are Indoctrinating Young People. Tell people to trust their own understanding when they don’t actually know much, and they fall for simple explanations and reject nuance as bullshit.