The new critical thinking seems to be blindly following who they see as academically superior. Racism on the left seems to be the desire to hold anyone regardless of race accountable for their actions. The deterioration of the black family unit and society is solid evidence of this yet they seem to double down on the same beliefs as things get worse. Politically the educated seem to think the constitution is just a piece of paper and anytime they perceive something for the greater good it is fine to ignore it. I research everything even though I would much rather ignore it. I look at each issue as a stand-alone issue as issues don’t have politics. Many of you have this elite attitude that seems to make you condescending and patronizing while you rip society apart convinced that you are doing the right thing.
You seem to have utterly missed or misunderstood @Babale’s point, so I’ll quote it to you again.
This is 180 degrees from what you just said about following the direction of those “academically superior.” You examine your own prejudice, your own moral standards, and your own assumptions of all sorts. The fact that you have also made it somehow about conservative vs liberal instead of formally educated vs not shows a ton of -your- underlying assumptions and further proves @Babale’s point.
Are you sure that you actually know the facts on these issues as well as you think you do?
It’s a conservative axiom, and has been for the last half-century at least, that “the black family unit” in the US is in perpetual crisis and disintegrating from within. But the evidence seems to indicate that overall prosperity for American Black people is making progress, even in the face of persistent racism.
So when conservatives reflexively appeal to alleged “deterioration of the black family unit and society” as “solid evidence” of the wrongheadedness of liberals, their claims need to be examined a bit more closely. Yes, somebody in this situation is blindly clinging to ideological myths rather than looking seriously at the data, but it doesn’t seem to be the liberals.
It’s really more about acknowledging that there is such a thing as being an expert in something.
Imagine someone who knows jack squat about farming, construction, car repair, plumbing, whatever “non-academic” pursuit you like, starts spouting off about how they know better than the people who have done it every single day for decades, because they watched a couple of youtube videos about it. That person is an idiot, a garden variety fool. The same kind of fool who applies that concept to virology, climate science, or gender studies.
For the record, this is pretty much the entire idea behind Clarkson’s Farm on Amazon Prime, although with (obviously) a huge budget to insulate the host from the real-world consequences and played for laughs. But when non-multimillionaire actors with gigantic budgets apply the same reasoning, we end up with tragedies, not comedies.
This is where I would be reaching for the “Like” button if we had one.
I think everyone should be held accountable for their actions, regardless of race. So that makes me a ………racist leftist?……. I wasn’t aware that this was a controversial opinion.
I obviously didn’t say that right, I may have been using voice text.
I must sheepishly confess that I, too, believe that everybody should be held accountable for their actions, regardless of race.
We agree!
But it’s not really “fair” in how it goes both ways, is it? The wealthy lawyer or investment banker making $500k a year driving a Mercedes doesn’t really care if the guy who mows his lawn thinks he’s a pretentious douche.
But isn’t that the essence of “sneerworthiness”? You are talking about a group of people lack a formal education who are politically disinclined and generally incurious who are only galvanized to action when they feel it threatens their society or perception of what “America” means.
The problem is that without an education or even an interest in learning, someone like that will have a very limited perspective of complex issues or how those issues actually impact them or society as a whole. They are susceptible to being manipulated by leaders who “dumb it down” for them, usually to serve their own ends.
One of the biggest problems with lack of education is that you don’t know what you don’t know.
Now on the other hand, academics and intellectuals can often abstract concepts without real understanding how they actually impact real people.
Am I being asked to respect “My ignorance is superior to your knowledge”?
The OP would have standing if Conservatives as a group were financially disadvantaged in this nation and that was the largest reason why they avoided secondary education since primary is mandated by law.
Since this is not the case, I can sleep well at night knowing my disdain for them is founded on their policies AND how they choose to spend their educational dollars. Or not, as it seems.
Education. Democrats lead by 22 points (57%-35%) in leaned party identification among adults with post-graduate degrees. The Democrats’ edge is narrower among those with college degrees or some post-graduate experience (49%-42%), and those with less education (47%-39%). Across all educational categories, women are more likely than men to affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic. The Democrats’ advantage is 35 points (64%-29%) among women with post-graduate degrees, but only eight points (50%-42%) among post-grad men.
From HERE. This is the elephant in the room. It is not any liberals fault any conservative doesn’t want higher education, The NPR self-flagellating notwithstanding.
But that’s (probably) not how it works. There’s not a group of people who are liberals and a group of people who are conservatives by nature, who then decide whether they want higher education or not. “Liberal” and “conservative” are political identities that people choose, and can change at any point in their lives. For many, perhaps most, people, those identities aren’t fully firmed-up until after they’ve made most of the key decisions about their education. In other words, it’s usually the education level that shapes the way people identify politically, not the other way around.
I think the OP is correct that there are elements in liberal (and especially progressive) political culture that are unwelcoming to people who are not college-educated professionals, and that’s one place the partisan split is coming from; people are not going to join a party where they feel like they don’t belong, or that they’re being looked down upon. I’d also say that it’s not confined to overt sneering, which is the easy part of the problem to tackle; a lot of stuff that is sincerely well-meant and trying to be inclusive of various other constituencies is also alienating to people with less formal education, such as the often very fine-grained debates about what terminology should be used when discussing marginalized groups. (I’m not talking here about slurs, but about the difference between “X people” and “people of / with / experiencing X,” and that sort of thing.) That sort of discussion comes naturally to people who are good with words, good at updating their knowledge, and acculturated to find small differences in vocabulary important – which is, most of the time, the type of people who are college-educated. If you’re not, it can feel like a minefield in which you’re constantly in danger of getting scolded for saying the wrong thing.
There’s an OP who’s like, “Sometimes liberals are prejudiced about those with less formal education, which can be classist.”
There are a million responses like, “But people with less formal education are averse to learning new things and conservative and responsible for Trump and bigots!”
Sadly, the bit about “prejudice” is pretty well-established at this point.
Of course there are conservative/liberal attitudes toward formal education. But there is also the incontrovertible fact that formal education is expensive, and that folks in poverty have less access to it. This includes both higher education, and even high school (when teens living in poverty are likely to have greater hurdles to graduation).
So when folks throw up stats about how less-educated people support Trump (or whatever) in a defense of sneering at those with less education, a huge portion of whom they’re sneering at is poor people.
Good point. And I will add, you can have a LOT of formal education and still feel like you’re in a minefield.
Yeah, I’m dumbing down my vocabulary all the time. I feel weird doing it, but I don’t want to look like I’m sneering.
How far should you go to coddle the feels of ignorant people?
Codeswitching is perfectly normal behavior. If you talk one way among academics fluent in academic-speak, and another way among teenagers fluent in teenspeak, and a third way among working-class folks fluent in working-class-speak, that’s just what adroit speakers do. Failing to codeswitch isn’t sneering, unless it’s a deliberate attempt to belittle someone; and in that case, a teenager deliberately using teen slang to flummox a parent is just as guilty.
Sure–teens shouldn’t have an obligation to forego slang, just because you or I are ignorant. But that has nothing to do with the topic of this thread, which is formal education.