The Stigma of Education

Maybe it was because I had just helped my daughter move into her freshman dorm room and I was envious of the deliciously named courses she was thinking of taking. Or maybe it was because I've always been a sucker for pitches like "Conversational Italian in One Day!" Or maybe it was because I didn't know what else to do with my rage about the anti-intellectual matches that the Republican presidential campaign is playing with.

Whatever the reason, I was a sitting duck for a publicist's offer to comp me to the first "One Day University" in Los Angeles. Judging from the full house paying $259 a pop, I wasn't alone.

The lineup included teachers from Columbia, Harvard, Dartmouth and USC. The subjects were Lincoln, the psychology of happiness, the history of cosmology and the foreign policies of an Obama or a McCain administration. The audience included not only the retirees seeking educational nourishment and brain fitness whom I had expected, but also boomers like me and more than a few people who looked to be in their 40s and 30s and even younger.

Three out of the four speakers really knew how to work a room, making good on the publicist's promise of a day of engaging "edutainment," and the fourth -- even though, unlike the others, he worked from a prepared text and never left his spot behind the lectern -- nevertheless held people's attention with his material.

All day long, while learning things like the average age for the first onset of depression (14 1/2, compared to twice that a generation ago), and the proportion of the universe containing carbon, oxygen and nitrogen, the elements that people are made of (less than 1 percent), I kept wondering what bound us students together, besides our common jones for knowledge.

The answer came home to me during the foreign policy lecture by my friend and USC colleague, professor Steven Lamy.

In the midst of providing an analytic framework for understanding the traditions and belief systems of U.S. foreign policy, he pointed out the substantive poverty of the discussion of foreign policy occurring during this campaign, despite so many grave foreign policy issues that will face the next president. Security challenges and security strategies? Yes, those are in the campaign mix. But dealing realistically with the global economy, or thinking creatively about using the U.S.'s non-military power, or grappling with the social threat that traditional cultures see posed by the massive exportation of American entertainment, or with the environmental threat posed by exporting our consumerist culture: issues like these -- not so much, or not at all.

The reason for this neglect is that the conduct of foreign policy is now all about electoral considerations, and the majority of the American people return the favor by not paying attention to it. The result, says Steve Lamy, is an uninformed American public easily manipulated by power players in Washington who prefer that the wide range of options potentially available for America's role in the world not be put on the table for scrutiny.

The irony is that there is a rising generation that does see foreign policy as something more than shouting, "9-11!" At USC, as Steve pointed out, the 791 undergraduates majoring in international relations -- one of the most popular majors in the college -- do know what the Bush doctrine is.

Which brings me to the thread binding the newest alumni of One Day U. Yes, I could be projecting my own feelings onto them. But from the questions they asked the faculty, from conversations I heard during breaks, from the room's reaction to Steve Lamy's mention of the foreign policy credential claimed by Sarah Palin with a straight face (you can see Russia from an island in Alaska), I had the strong impression that the people in that auditorium were connected by a common sense of outrage at the demonization of learning going on in this campaign.

To be sure, every campaign, in both parties, relies on bumper-sticker slogans and 30-second ads, and, at least since the 1980s, television has proven itself dismally unequal to the opportunity for covering a campaign as a national conversation about the big issues facing the country.

Yet the way the McCain campaign has turned "elite" into a dirty word, and delightedly derided Obama's education as effete, and turned the sow's ear of Sarah Palin's lack of foreign policy experience into the silk purse of salt-of-the-earth small town values -- you have to go back to Spiro Agnew and his bullyboy ventriloquists, Pat Buchanan and William Safire, to find this kind of sneering contempt for educated people.

The neoconservative intellectuals who have fanned these fires have particularly dirty hands. With their Ivy League degrees and their perches as columnists and commentators, their collaboration with the Republican defamation of learning is especially disingenuous. By being accomplices to what is arguably the most lying campaign in modern history, they are complicit with the same noxious rejection of reason that has brought us the teaching of "intelligent design" (aka creationism) in our schools; the politicization of science in everything from climate change to environmental regulations; and the intrusion of fundamentalist religious doctrines into the shaping of public policy.

I see adult education as a political act, a refutation of this neo-Know Nothingism. I see reading a good newspaper as a thumb in the eye to this anti-intellectual hypocrisy and to candidates who refuse to hold press conferences. I see the conversation occurring in some online precincts, and among people who have abandoned cable news for actual discussions about issues they care about, as a patriotic response to the political porn served up to us by mainstream media. I see studying and going to the best school you can and learning to think critically as a powerful antidote to the homespun yahooism that is being held up to us as the gold standard of competence.

Sure, some people may have signed up for One Day U because it looked like fun, or to get out of the house, or just because they were curious. But curiosity is a quality that has been lethally absent in the occupant of the White House these last eight years, and if you listen to the team that could well replace him, having a healthy intellectual appetite is wussily un-American.

I don't doubt that Americans who love learning may constitute a minority. I just hope that enough of them live in battleground states to make a difference.

(This is adapted from my column in The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, where you can email me if you'd like.)

Follow Marty Kaplan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martykaplan

Comments

[orkranger]

The main problem with No Child Left Behind is that there is no National Achievement test. Each state has it's own standards of testing. The standards of Texas may not meet the standards of New York or Alabama. Standardized testing is fine, but it must be consistant. Student's need a full education, which includes Art, Music and Physical Education. The US is the only developed country that does not have a national standardized test. Is it any wonder that we are falling behind in education of our youth?

[CassandraPriam]

Americans don't like moral intelligent leadership.
What does that say about us as a people?

[Errour]

It's also true that the university itself is undergoing a tremendous metamorphosis, so the generalities that used to be more or less valid about college graduates already require review. Conservative politics in the form of "assessment" has given the Bush posse a lot of punch on campus, and the failure of academics to recognize the implications of the changes their world is undergoing is not reassuring. All too often, these highly-educated professionals behave with no more wisdom than the crowd of dimwits in the White House. As someone once said, "Eggheads, throw off your yokes!"

[research]

there are no worth while newspapers. Even the NYT aided and abetted BushCo Iraq War Crimes lies.

[darker]

IGNORANCE IS FABULOUS FOR getting REPUBLICANS VOTES!

The tragedy of voting in America is that Republican strategists
MOBILIZED THE MINDLESS to vote for THE CORRUPT.

A huge victory for a greedy and vicious minority that wants unlimited and
permanent power to do whatever they please at any cost.

ENOUGH OF THE REPUBLICAN voter SCAM!
NO MORE YEARS for CORRUPT REPUBLICAN LIARS.
America needs a LEADER: OBAMA.

[isis]

I read ( oh, is that so wrong?) that this is going on in Canada too. My local news has a column written by a group called the Public Policy Institute. They flat out lie and when I pointed this out the editor said that they weren't lying, it was just opinion. When is lying part of an opinion? Groups like this make people dumb and also cynical.

[2012isnear]

Im off to watch Jon Stuart to cheer me up after my morning of catching up on the state of affairs in your once great nation.

[rixter1965]

It is always a good thing to bring up an exception or an anecdote that contradicts the conventional wisdom (a high school or college drop out that founds a mutlibillion-dollar corporation, a mail-room clerk that works his/her way up to CEO, a custodian who saves and leaves millions to a foundation or school, etc.), but...

Let's not kid ourselves. The excpetion does not NEGATE the rule. Rather, it proves it. Anti-intel­lecutalism has a long tradition in the United States -- as a slogan, usually, but not so much among pseudo-populist elites who rush to get their progeny into Ivy League or equivalent schools. Even the military academies, after all, are not the refuge of losers, but rather of those pursuing another track to power, presitge and wealth.

Up-and-coming economic/politcal powers India and China are producing enormous numbers of engineers, programmers, physicians, MBAs, etc. -- sometimes matriculating at US universities -- and Americans seem to be turning up their noses at higher education. Humility is good -- no one should look down on someone because of a lesser educational background, but nor should someone sneer at someone because they actually have a degree.

If you think cheap merchandise from China, etc. is a great deal for you, time to think about the bigger picture.

[NotaBene]

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We’re now first in line, and should be cleared for takeoff as soon as this fog clears. But before we begin our flight, I just want to take a moment to reassure you that I’m no one special. I know some customers worry about that, but I’m just a regular guy. I’m pretty much just like all of you out there in coach. I’m sure you’d really like me if we had to kill some time together in the airport bar. And I didn’t go to some fancy, expensive, Type A kind of flight school, where they make you learn everything about every detail of aviation and weather and navigation and all that. Plane takes off, plane flies, plane lands; they practically fly themselves these days, what’s the big deal, really? The important thing is that I’m an honest, hardworking guy who really believes in this airline, believes it’s a special airline, in fact the greatest airline in the world, and that the good Lord in heaven feels the same way. It’s an honor to serve you, the flying public, as your pilot. So now sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. The in-flight entertainment will begin shortly.

[KosmicKat]

It's a sad paradox that our country should be the most enlightened in the history of the world, but isn't. We have more free and almost-free information at our fingertips than any other civilization in history. Americans can learn anything they wish to learn, and enrich their personal cultural lives, without even going to schools. All the necessary information for learning is readily available to be read and researched by any literate American individual. But we're a nation composed primarily of ignoramuses who don't realize and don't care about the rich sources of learning available to them, because all the information in the world can't create the desire to learn.
A country that despises the intellect is doomed to lose leadership and influence to countries that revere the intellect and learning. I can see America declining in intellectual prowess while cultures like those of western Europe, Japan, China and India, which value education and learning, are rising to prominence as future world leaders. America looks doomed to decline into a pseudo-medieval backwater run by right-wing religious fanatics and trigger-happy warmongers.
But what the Right sees as its greatest strength -- its contempt for intellect and education -- is also its greatest weakness. With education and the values of the Enlightenment, we can defeat the Right and its designs upon us.

[larry278]

There is a small problem. Some of us who were graduated from a college or university worked & studied diligently because a degree was a ticket out of the masses. We didn't [& still don't] want to live & work among the masses. We don't bowl or play bingo or go to baseball games. We read, go to plays & watch tennis [if we watch sports]. We think that our life is more interesting than the life or Joe or Jane 6-pack. Dare I say it, we're intellectual or pseudo-intellectual snobs. We don't want to & don't socialize with the 6-pack family & their ilk.
While we want everbody to live a tolerable life with a living wage, a house, health care, etc. We don't want to live among the less educated. They eat Wonder Bread; we eat nan. The elite are different.
Those who eat Wonder Bread aren't stupid. The see that the elite look down on them * know that we nag our kids to study & work hard so that our kids won't have to eat Wonder Bread of live as common people live. We are biased & elitist.. Maybe we ought to try being honest about ourselves.

[Clavis]

What do you mean, "we"? Speak for yourself.

I don't watch tennis, I don't go to plays, I don't bathe in champagne or smear caviar on my foie gras. I eat Wonderbread sometimes. I ate at Burger King yesterday and had a Coke the day before.

This notion that people with more education and intellect are all fancy-pants snooty country-club types is BULLSH*T, and it's exactly the kind of stereotype the Republicans love to spread.

Either you're a Republican troll, or you're just out of touch. Either way, don't do "us" any favors by continuing to claim to represent "us".

[orkranger]

I started college at 40, recieved a double degree in education and biology, I am currently unemployed due to state cut-backs in education. I make less than my five brothers and sisters, who never attended graduated college. I didn't get educated to make money, but to educate others.

[joebiz]

Good post. Evidently, elites attend college and hold academic degrees.

According to a recent tally by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the number of US colleges and universities is about 2,618. The UK has about 325. This number means that there IS a market for ideas within an educational framework. And, that there are people who are willing to attend centers of higher learning for additional education and or training. Many of whom graduate and then go on to advaced degrees.

Another stat by the US Census shows that 52 percent of adults over 25 have attended college; about 25 percent graduated; and about 9 percent hold advanced, graduate, and or professional degrees.

The GOP has asserted by virtue of denigrating the accomplishments of the Democratic candidates that being educated is to be an "elitist." By virtue of the stats above, almost half of the population are a "little bit elitists" and one-quarter are full elites. With the remaining 9 percent being "super elites."

Doesn't this line of reasoning question the divisive Republican leadership ? And, make you want to vote Democrat?

[robXdion]

Entertainment makes Americans dumb.Think about it. People know more about celebrities and their lives than they would ever understand about Wall Street. Nevermind the two topics are just as complex. Hollywood dumbs people down thru passive distractions, shortens attention spans, and retards learning capabilities. People conceptualize something if they've never saw it on TV. Hollywood falling into the Pacific would be the best thing to happen to America's collective growth. The escapism has become dangerously negligent. And if it doesn't stop, it'll be the death of this country.

[LostE]

Thank you for putting your thumb on something that's been bothering me about the whole "experience" issue. There's no real evidence that experience leads to good governance. Just take a look at some of the people who've been POTUS.

Experienced advisors can help to make up for naiveté. I don't know of anything that can make up for deliberate ignorance.

There seems to be little evidence that Gov. Palin gave any thought whatsoever to any national or international issue that didn't directly affect Alaska before a month ago.

(Hey! Both dems went to my almae matres - I probably _would_ like to sit and have a beer with either of them...)

[Fez]

As satirists from Mark Twain to H.L. Mencken to S.J. Perelman have noted, Americans have always been anti-intellectual and damn proud of it. But we sure picked the wrong decade to retreat into the 7th century of ignorance and hysteria. It's high time that American leaders confront bogus "science" like intelligent design and creationism. Call it what it is: ignorance and fear masquerading as evidence and data. And this lame effort at "fairness" (e.g., one the one hand, but on the other hand...), enough already. Some ideas are just plain wrong. I guarantee you that the Chinese and Indians are not allowing religious fundamentalism corrupt their educational systems. Instead they are laughing up their sleeves as Americans whinny about the Rapture and humans living with the dinosaurs.