Don’t take this badly, but in my experience, formal Education doesn’t teach people Skepticism (the real deal, not the Denialism that morons have whilst thinking they’re being “skeptics”). It also doesn’t at all train people to be self-aware and spot when it’s an emotion (fear, wanting to belong, even hope) making them want to believe something rather than cold hard logic.
My formal Education is in Science and Engineering, and whilst education in those areas does push you more towards a more analytical kind of thinking and an as objective as possible measuring of things, most higher education out there is in soft “sciences” at best, or even just the kind of domains were the main required expertise is in convincing people, so the very opposite of being as Objective and Logical as possible.
From my observations even some people with higher education in a Sciences or Engineering domain are gullible cattle when it comes to politics, mainly because they don’t engage it with logic and the way of thinking they use in their professional life, but rather with tribalism (which is emotional) or just straight raw emotion (like anger or fear) and thus are stupidly simple to control and pretty much self-convince that whatever the propagandists want them to believe is true even when the most basic analysis of it immediatelly shows inconsistencies.
TL;DR Whilst better and more Education somewhat improves people’s resilience to propaganda, even the highest levels of Education in highly objective and analytical domains won’t make people immune to this shit, since people are controlled via emotional subconscious cognitive pathways, not logic, and even highly intellectual people who WANT to believe something will find some kind of seemingly “logic” explanation to conclude that which they want to believe is indeed so.
Well, it seems like the propaganda and defunding schools worked as intended. These are the vote-cattle the right are working towards.
Don’t take this badly, but in my experience, formal Education doesn’t teach people Skepticism (the real deal, not the Denialism that morons have whilst thinking they’re being “skeptics”). It also doesn’t at all train people to be self-aware and spot when it’s an emotion (fear, wanting to belong, even hope) making them want to believe something rather than cold hard logic.
My formal Education is in Science and Engineering, and whilst education in those areas does push you more towards a more analytical kind of thinking and an as objective as possible measuring of things, most higher education out there is in soft “sciences” at best, or even just the kind of domains were the main required expertise is in convincing people, so the very opposite of being as Objective and Logical as possible.
From my observations even some people with higher education in a Sciences or Engineering domain are gullible cattle when it comes to politics, mainly because they don’t engage it with logic and the way of thinking they use in their professional life, but rather with tribalism (which is emotional) or just straight raw emotion (like anger or fear) and thus are stupidly simple to control and pretty much self-convince that whatever the propagandists want them to believe is true even when the most basic analysis of it immediatelly shows inconsistencies.
TL;DR Whilst better and more Education somewhat improves people’s resilience to propaganda, even the highest levels of Education in highly objective and analytical domains won’t make people immune to this shit, since people are controlled via emotional subconscious cognitive pathways, not logic, and even highly intellectual people who WANT to believe something will find some kind of seemingly “logic” explanation to conclude that which they want to believe is indeed so.