I don’t know if it’s that simple. I came from a rural working class background that included periods of poverty, and at the time of my college enrollment I was an emancipated minor with basically nothing. The people I was surrounded by growing up were not people with a lack of access to education, they were people who didn’t care about education, in fact who often held the very concept in contempt. Take the lyrics of a popular country song at that time:
Now, there ain’t no shame in a job well done
From driving a nail to driving a truck
As a matter of fact, I’d like to set things straight
A few more people should be pullin’ their weight
If you want a cram course in reality
You get yourself a Working Man’s Ph.D.
The very obvious implication here, which I was hit in the face with everywhere I went, is that educated people aren’t doing real work and they are at a complete disconnect from “reality.” This attitude toward formal education is why I never felt like I belonged, not even with my own parents (my own mother, who actually had a degree in engineering but left the field for a working class job/lifestyle and looked down on educated people, including me) and of course I never fully belonged in academia either because I came from a community of rural working class people.
I think poverty can be a proxy for what actually does keep people from school - generational trauma, being expected to work to support your family, and a culture that is so vehemently pro-independence that kids are tossed out on their ass at age eighteen - assuming the kid wasn’t thrown out sooner. Now that’s rural white working class stuff, I can’t speak to the experience of people of color. But to suggest that this is an issue primarily about how much money someone makes is to not really understand the culture.
Absolutely! I’m not denying that this happens. But it’s not an either/or thing. In addition to some contempt among working-class folks for formal education, there’s also a financial barrier to obtaining formal education. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility (but is probably beyond the extent of this thread topic) that some of the contempt is sour grapes, and that some of it is, “Well, fuck you too, buddy” response to the contempt that folks without formal education experience from those with.
I’d contrast this with my experience. My grandparents all immigrated from Mexico in the early 20th century. They were uneducated. None of them graduated high school. My paternal grandmother couldn’t read, in either English or Spanish. Their peers in the neighborhoods they grew up in all had similar stories.
Fast forward to my parents generation. They all graduated high school. Most of them (my uncles, aunts, and their friends in the barrio) went on to college (this was in the 60s and 70s). They went on to work jobs like public school teachers, civil service jobs like postal workers, skilled blue collar jobs like plumbers and electricians, white collar jobs like accountants and nurses, as well as careers in the military and owning small businesses. The story with my generation is similar, except now a lot of us went on to get doctorate degrees of various sorts.
The key is that even back in my grandparents generation, people valued education and knew it was a good way forward, even though they themselves weren’t educated. I certainly never knew my grandparents or any of their friends to sneer at people for being educated. In fact many of the people in their generation worked extra hours, often doing hard physical labor like picking cotton, to save up so that their kids could go to college.
Why such differences in cultures? I don’t know, but it’s clear to me that it’s not a simple matter of being poor = disparaging education.
It’s not. Where I live, the public university is $5-7K per year and something like 60% of students get enough financial aid that tuition is essentially free. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any people who encounter financial barriers to a college education but it does cut down on it. For the most part, it’s not poverty itself that keeps people from getting a college education here - it’s certain attitudes that are associated with the working class. There’s some contempt for education , but it’s more a feeling that it’s unnecessary. My son had a friend who lived down the block. This friend was the only one of their group who didn’t go to college. Neither did his brothers. I don’t know all the details of their finances, but they did buy a single family home in NYC so they were not dirt poor. The friend (and his brothers) didn’t go to college because the parents felt that they did fine without going to college , and the kids didn’t need to go either. When I was young, I wondered why so many of the neighbors took such an interest in my family and college - they would keep track of when we were due to graduate and which college we attended. It was very strange- and I realized later that of all the kids in the neighborhood , we were literally the only ones who went to college. All the rest graduated from high school and went straight to work. Their families weren’t exactly poor either - the boys followed their fathers into union and/or civil service jobs that paid well enough but didn’t require college and the girls had gone to high schools that taught typing and steno ( I graduated in 1981) . My two sisters and I couldn’t escape the neighborhood completely and ended up in civil service jobs that required degrees.
As for why we went to college- my mother gets all the credit as my father was very conflicted. On the one hand , he was happy we would do better than he had but on the other hand, he didn’t believe college graduates worked for a living.
I usually find the disdain aimed at the softer side of academia. i.e. History, literature, sociology, etc., etc. that a lot of people just don’t see any practical use for in their day-to-day lives. Being a male dominated field, do you think your mother ran into sexism and maybe internalized some of it? (Holy cow, that sounds like something an educated person might ask.)
Even as far back as high school, financial difficulties can prevent students from graduating:
It also hits in college, even for schools with robust financial aid:
I wonder whether the reasoning we’re seeing in this thread–essentially, that low-income people could go to school, they just don’t want to–is part of the class prejudice I’m talking about.
I don’t think anyone is quite saying that low-income people could go to school, they just don’t want to. But it’s not a matter of poverty being the only factor - none of the families I talked about were poor , not my neighbors when I was a kid nor my son’s friend. They weren’t even poor compared to the families with kids who went to college. And it’s not just a matter of some people looking down on education, either. They simply didn’t see the need for their kids to spend four years in college paying tuition when they could get a good enough job without it.
There’s a certain amount of class prejudice in the idea that everyone values education and if they don’t go to college, it must be due to financial difficulties.
My mother left engineering because of the sexism. She couldn’t stand it. And I think it colored her perception of educated people moving forward. She was supportive of me educating myself but she frequently referred to educated people as snobs and lectured me whenever she thought I was talking too educated. She made me paranoid about how I come off to other people. And in my adult life she continued to shame me for being a snob when I’m not one, actually. She just used my education as a proxy for snobbery. I find it ironic that the woman who instilled in me the value of a good education, who encouraged me to become educated (as long as I don’t act like it, I guess) would later use my education against me. But we don’t have a relationship anymore so it’s a non-issue.
It’s interesting because I think she passed this on to me and I internalized it somehow. My son’s intelligence appears to be surpassing my own, and I hate haaaaaaate when my husband brags about our son’s math skills to other people. It’s like bragging about being rich or otherwise lucky. I don’t want to my son to get the idea that he’s better just because he won the genetic lottery for intelligence.
**There are many ways to be intelligent. I don’t want to conflate educated with intelligent but in this case I’m talking about the kind of intelligence that helps you to do very well in school and then get a pretty good salary out of it. It’s a privilege one is born with, like being born rich or pretty, totally unearned (though it requires some effort to maintain) and completely nonsensical to brag about.
Strongly disagree. We are talking about 18+ here. When I was 18 I knew everything. Now in my 40’s I read my teenage journals with a healthy dose of mirth and yet my entire world view was shaped to an incredible degree by the people that had the most power over me for the only two decades I have been alive. Of course you can pick your political persuasion, you can also pick your faith and football team. What a coincidence the child will most likely agree with the parent, at least at this point in their lives.
However, there are some comedians (usually from Britain or Australia) that Liberals like because they poke fun at the more uneducated Americans. The implication is education is the reason people vote differently, but those jokes are also insulting poor and uneducated liberals.
At least in our time I feel this is fueled a great deal by science denialism, and THAT comes from corporate greed and the propaganda it needs to be maintained. Liberals don’t need to beat themselves up for what Conservatives reject.
Side note on this though. The current Republican/Conservative crop is actively supporting efforts to turn primary education into “positive” political propaganda, and actively seeks to eliminate critical thinking. Thus, they are attempting (succeeding in many cases) in creating a perpetual class of unthinking acceptance of the status quo or even reactionary reversion to some rose-tinted past of perfection.
Thus, as the trends continue or accelerate (may it NOT be so) we are almost certainly going to have an even sharper divide between those who have more formal education than the default, if only because all ‘college bound’ as it were elements are going to be filtered out.
I’ll disagree with the notion that this kind of sneering is usually prejudice. Prejudice is, by definition, unreasonable. I don’t think it’s generally unreasonable to devalue the opinion of someone with less education.
The primary benefit of a formal education - to the eyes of others - is the credential of a degree. The degree is a mark of credibility in a number of areas. An undergraduate degree certifies, among other things, the bearer’s capacity for critical reasoning. Therefore it is reasonable to generally assume that the opinion of a person who has an undergraduate degree is more credible than that of a person without a college education. What is reasonable cannot be prejudicial, therefore it is not prejudicial to make that general assumption.
There are exceptions - a person without a college education can demonstrate greater capability in any given area than another person who has a college education. Your mechanic, for example, will probably know more about auto repair than your boss who has an MBA. Or you may know that your friend is better at critical thinking than most people with college degrees, and so you value her opinion more. But these are exceptions to the general rule. I’d call them the specialist and genius exceptions, respectively.
Having established that sneering at people with less formal education is not necessarily prejudice, I now consider whether the sneering which is prejudiced counts as class based prejudice. My answer is, not necessarily.
Certainly classism can manifest as sneering at people with less formal education. (So can racism.) But just because there is a correlation between higher education and higher economic status does not mean there is an analogous bias against poor people.
Take the attitude of doctors of medicine towards the medical opinions of doctors of osteopathy, registered nurses, medical assistants, or laymen. I’ve worked in the medical field and witnessed first-hand the sneering when an MD disagrees with a self-diagnosis. There is no disrespect to the economic status of the patient who resorts to Doctor Google. They simply feel that they are better educated and therefore more qualified, not that their wealth entitles them to some sort of patrician society.
I’m loathe to comment on the liberal-conservative angle, but I will note that access to higher education is a stereotypical liberal cause. If discrimination on the absence of formal education were class based prejudice (which it isn’t necessarily), then people who lack formal education would correspond to the plebeian class. Therefore access to higher education for all would destroy the class system; it would be somewhat contradictory for a stereotypical liberal to both support the class system (sneering at the less-educated) while actively working to destroy it (access to higher education).
There are at least two definitions of critical thinking, the trivial one where you think badly of someone or something, and the serious one that has to do with weighing evidence from a wide variety of sources and being open to your POV being mistaken – without being hopelessly mired in continual self-doubt.
Primary school students can only engage in the first. If they hear a lot of criticism of the Democrats, probably because of living in a heavily GOP neighborhood, they will be critical of the President when a Democrat, and if they hear a lot of criticism of the Republicans, they will be critical of the President when a Republican. This isn’t just an American phenomena. Going by what our son who taught English classes in Taiwan has told me, six years olds there will be similarly critical of people and policies depending on whether or not they live in a heavily Democratic Progressive Party town.
Primary education can’t really help pushing particular political perspectives. I hope teachers don’t spend a lot of time on it, but I don’t want to muzzle them either.
Then in high school you should foster critical thinking by teaching history with primary sources and disagreeing opinion articles rather than textbooks.
For the record, when I was speaking of primary education, I was predominantly speaking of Middle School through Highschool. I’d grant elementary students (with many exceptions, but on the whole) aren’t going to go in for sophisticated analysis, but Middle School and up certainly are. Thus my explicit mention of the ‘college bound’ pathing you normally see in the higher levels.
MAGA types and increasingly the rest of the Republican party are taking umbrage at any student in the higher two public courses doing any sort of evaluation for themselves, which is quite evident from the bills they’ve been passing. And by doing so, they strongly limit the chances of those without additional formal schooling (the point of the thread) from developing those skills.
The real problem is that less educated people tend to sneer at those with advanced degrees, treating with contempt their struggle to master often difficult, complicated subjects and to compete with others who have gone through the same process, all of which tends to draw a response that can seem condescending.
I just think that, you know, we’ve weighed everything up rationally and dispassionately as our formal education trained us to do and it turns out after a rigorous examination that poor people are just awful. Also, we don’t need to change in any way. You might say that’s class prejudice but how can it be, given that all the right kind of people agree?
I would argue that education, in and of itself, is neutral. For example, a major political issue in my home country of Israel has to do with the fact that very religious people can skip their military service if they go study Torah instead. That’s certainly a form of education. Is it valuable? Does it make the people who go through it better prepared to deal with the world; do they strengthen Israel’s economy or military security? Well, they would certainly argue that it does, because it’s what God wants them to do and they believe he will reward their nation for allowing them to do this. The rest of us might be dubious.
I don’t think that someone who spent years and years at Yeshiva is going to be exempt from the sneering the OP discusses, and I find it hard to imagine a structure more formal than a Yeshiva.
I think the real divide isn’t really in education level. It is in a societal attitude towards how to make decisions. Remember a lifetime ago, when Bush’s advisor allegedly made disparaging comments about the “reality based community”? That’s what this really comes down to.
Humans are incredibly prone to bias. We are hardwired that way. I don’t mean racism or misogyny (I mean, that too, but it’s a different conversation); I mean that our brains love to build an explanatory model of the world and will then bend over backwards to ensure that our perception of reality matches this explanatory model. This means that when making decisions we cannot simply trust our intuition; we must always question every assumption we hold, study our own positions (and use feedback from people who are as different from us as possible) again and again to find assumptions we hold so deeply that we don’t even realize they are assumptions; and of course, reexamine these beliefs again when new evidence comrs to light.
This is the only way to combat inherent human bias. And it’s not perfect. You can find many flaws with the scientific method as currently applied, and things like a famous name attached to a paper as a coauthor carry far more weight than they should. This has led to failures in the past, and will continue to lead to failures in the future. HOWEVER… At least the attempt to understand the world as it truly is is being made.
Is this way of looking at reality unique to college graduates? No, of course not. Is it universal among college graduates? That’s another negative, I’m afraid. There IS a correlation, though, because this is something colleges at least attempt to teach while in my experience very, very few high school courses ever did. And that may be the source of the sneering the OP mentions.
So… what’s the answer? In my opinion, we need to decouple this way of looking at the world from higher education. The goal of our education system should be to train children in carrying out this process.
I don’t think discounting the “reality-based community” based on the fact that some people don’t have the educational opportunity to join it makes much sense. Looking at the world through this lens DOES give better results. At the same time, I definitely reserve much harsher judgement for educated people who don’t critically examine their own beliefs (or worse, cynically fleece people by pandering to beliefs they likely don’t even actually hold) than for uneducated people who never had the opportunity.
But as I was trying to point out upthread, you can be a person with no formal education and still try to learn things, and examine your own beliefs critically. That is true whether you are poor or rich. And you can be extremely well-educated and demonstrate contempt for critical thinking just as well. I honestly don’t know if most people learn how to think critically in college, but I certainly did. My high school education did not prepare me for the sheer level of thinking I would be doing in college. So I tend to associate those two. But I don’t think college is necessary to be a good critical thinker. I have known people throughout the years with little formal education who read books, engage in reasoned debate, do not take the beliefs of other people personally, and hold their own feet to the fire. Those are traits I admire and I am hardly perfect in that regard. People who have never been to college but are able to think critically are more like me than people who are highly educated but refuse to think critically. So to pretend this is just about economic status is a bit facile, I think. I’ve known people from all walks of life who enjoy learning for its own sake.
The most obvious example that comes to my mind is my grandfather, who grew up on a farm, took a handful of classes in community college and by the end of his career was a well-paid, well-respected engineer. He got that way by being absolutely obsessed with the power grid and how it works (his autistic hyper-fixation plays in here.) When they started using computers, he was first in line to learn how to use them. To this day he fixes his own computers. Growing up I always assumed he had a very high level of education because he was so obviously sharp - and that was my ignorance, his existence proves that being poor or uneducated need not be a barrier to high-level reasoning and critical thinking. So yes, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to hold someone accountable if they are making things worse because of their refusal to learn and be sensible. If you want to call that sneering, fine.
I agree, and I said so in my post. I do think that without certain tools (that aren’t emphasized enough in our society until higher education, but this doesn’t inherently have to be so) it is incredibly hard to overcome natural human bias, and even with those tools it is a never ending struggle. But you are right, some people (much smarter people than I did) arrive at similar conclusions without the benefit of a formal education. I have a ton of respect for people who can do that.
Oh, absolutely. You have your folk like Ben “Facts don’t care about your feelings but they do care about my religion” Shapiro who are as closed-minded as they come despite possessing the training to do better.
Agreed on both counts, and as I’ve said in other threads I can point to a specific Philosophy class that made me realize how hypocritical it was not to examine all of my beliefs and which forced me to come to terms with ideological doubts I’d previously managed to suppress. Easily and by far the most valuable educational experience I ever had. And I also agree that it doesn’t have to be that way; the fact that I got through 12 years of public schooling without feeling compelled to examine my own beliefs is almost criminal. A huge failure of our educational system.
Agreed, agreed, and agreed. People who manage to figure this stuff out without formal education are brilliant, and I have nothing but respect for them.
I would caution that being open to changing your belief can potentially be a different quality than enjoying learning for its own sake. My father had no formal education past high school; however, he likes to learn, he’s always reading things or watching documentaries, and my own love of learning was inspired by this. My father definitely values education, too. He has always regreted his own lack of higher ed.
However… he doesn’t view education the same way I do. He learns things because he views knowledge as a tool that can help him accomplish his goals. But he would never change his goals based on what he has learned. An extremely formative moment for me came some time after I took that philosophy class. We were talking about religion, and about some of the historical evidence (or lack thereof) for a story mentioned in the bible. And his response was basically, “I choose not to learn about that stuff because I am Jewish and faithful, nothing I learn can change that, so I do not study that topic”. I’m sure he’d expressed similar sentiments before, but until I had taken that class I probably didn’t see the issue with it. Now, though, I was horrified - because I realized that he had put into words (words that I intensely disagreed with) my own feelings on faith… and now that my feelings were so clearly defined, and so clearly in opposition to all my other values, that I had to face my own beliefs.
My father values education because it is a useful tool in our society. He sees that more educated people are more successful, and that’s what he wanted for me. If I use my Economics degree to land a high paying job, he couldn’t be more proud; but when I use that same education to question a fiscal policy we both used to support, he thinks I’m insane.
My grandfathed (on my mom’s side) was very similar. He eventually suffered an injury that led to physical and mental decline and finally his passing, but right up until then he was extremely sharp, both interested in and knowledgeable about engineering and math. He didn’t learn all of the physics he knew from books - he learned it by experimenting with models and independently coming up with many of the same equations. He was easily one of the brightest people I’ve known, although he wasn’t really ever able to leverage that due to his circumstances.
Is it possible we all have such a “hands off” topic? I suspect we’ve all got something where we’re just not open to learning contradictory information. Maybe a good idea for a thread.
My favorite example of “educated but doesn’t know shit” is Jordan Peterson. He misrepresents psychological principles to prop up his own belief system, and is the bane of my husband’s existence, who has more than a few clients who laud the guy. And my husband, who has a rigid sense of ethics about abuse of power, can’t say anything about it. But I’m sure deep down he’s like, “Well, Karl, maybe if you stopped buying into the misogynist crap Peterson’s peddling, you’d get along better with your girlfriend.”