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Honestly I don’t think this is just the foreign affairs people, it’s becoming endemic to most PMCs through the creeping credentialism promoted by university. There’s a large and growing population of people— most of them college graduates— who think that unless you have studied a topic in a college classroom, you cannot have possibly learned it. No, you cannot just read the Western canon and understand it. No, you cannot possibly learn philosophy without a lecture hall. No, you don’t understand math or statistics until you have gotten college credits.
I find the whole notion doubly ridiculous. First because people have self educated for hundreds of years, and it used to be the standard. Abraham Linchpin taught himself law by reading law books. Most of his peers did the same thing. And it wasn’t just law. If you wanted to run a business, you taught yourself accounting, and so on. Books, video, internet and other sources are much more available now than ever before, and any determined person can teach themselves just about anything they want to. They might have to work a bit harder than their peers who get spoon fed readings and practice sets, but in return, they will absolutely know their stuff as they aren’t studying for a test (and going to forget it afterwards) but trying to learn and understand it.
But much more importantly, I see a lot of ignorance in college grads that make me doubt the process does anything more than what they did in high school on most topics. They don’t actually understand the outside world. They don’t understand that electric cars are plugged into the electrical grid and thus would cause whatever types of pollution that our current electric grid causes. They don’t know anything concrete about other countries. Gays for Palestine is a joke that’s been told a million times, but it’s true, they don’t know what Islam has to say about LGBT rights. They don’t know the whole history of the conflict or why Jews went to Palestine in the first place. They cannot find Ukraine on an unlabeled map, nor do they know anything about its population, industry, minerals, or strategic importance. They have no idea why Russia wants it, nor the history of the region. Go down the list and it’s just amazing how the education that’s supposed to make you a better citizen of the country and the world produces a population with strong opinions but no knowledge.
The people who don’t get that education form equally strong opinions and have an equal lack of knowledge. You simply like their opinions better.
Most people do not, in fact, teach themselves philosophy or statistics from the Internet. Instead they learn directly-relevant job skills plus whatever knowledge floats around their social sphere. The conflict happens when someone tries to privilege their social-sphere knowledge.
These are standard, intuitive social tactics. They’re also decoupled from reality. Unfortunately, the natural response is similarly decoupled, because it’s way easier to shout “nuh uh!” than to explain law or philosophy or chemistry to amateurs. Especially when the Truth is genuinely still under debate.
I’d like to think that’s why we’re here.
I don’t like either one. If we’re to have an open and honest conversation on any political topic, basic facts are key to the discussion. Knowing where Ukraine is, why it matters, its key economic outputs, population, etc matters. For that matter knowing what Russia wants Ukraine for and why Crimea is so important to it’s perceived national security interests, or why having Ukraine potentially join EU and NATO is such a risk is vitally important here. But if you have no idea where Ukraine is, or the history of Russia being invaded because it has no natural features on its borders, or that Crimea was one of the Soviet Union’s main warm water ports to Europe, it’s hard to make sense out of the issue.
Likewise on anything science. If you don’t understand the basics of how the science in question works, or if it’s a legal question, what the law in question actually says, there’s no real point. It’s just vibes based conversation. I lean left you lean right, whatever.
My main beef with modern university education (outside of some job-skills based training) is that it’s not creating people capable of learning and understanding for themselves so much as people who simply believe the consensus views and have large doses of credential-based smugness. They don’t bother to look up the facts before deciding that their side is right. They don’t read books, or bother to find out what the other side of the issue actually thinks. We spend more time and energy on critical thinking and higher education than any generation in human history only to produce a society of people who are the least curious about the world, least interested in finding out the facts before making a decision, least able or willing to think logically than previous generations who had less schooling. My grandfather who didn’t even graduate from college was pretty well educated because he was constantly reading nonfiction books about whatever topics interested him. He was a pretty careful and logical thinker as well and able to make good decisions in business because of that.
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I can't tell whether this is a silly autocorrect fail or an incredibly clever pun+metaphor.
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