[japhyr]

I've been trying for a long time to understand all the anti-education, anti-science sentiment we've been seeing in the US for so long now. I think a lot of it comes from how much college is emphasized over everything else in k-12 education in the US.

My son is heading to high school next year, and in the big welcome event for incoming 9th graders every mention of post high-school life was phrased as "college and career". I tried to listen with the mindset of someone who didn't go to college, and was doing quite fine. It definitely felt like those people were being spoken down to. There were no overt statements against non-college outcomes, but the emphasis was quite clear.

I've watched this play out in my own family. A bunch of extended family members have become quite successful without any college education. When I talk to them today, decades after graduating high school, they still carry so much resentment about how they felt they were treated back then.

[sockp0pp3t]

anti-education occurs when education is watered down with indoctrination and ideology. Then people equate "education" with what's currently taught. This is dangerous because anti-education becomes anti-learning. Chris Rock had a bit about this.

[pstuart]

I think a lot of that sentiment comes from the conservative/religious right, which sees college as a dangerous thing that turns their obedient children into free thinkers and other forms of deviancy.

Another aspect of this is simply pandering by reframing the class war into "intellectual elites" vs the owner class.

College isn't for everyone, but it should be accessible to all that want it.

[throw0101c]

> In considering the historic tension between access to education and excellence in education, Hofstadter argued that both anti-intellectualism and utilitarianism were in part consequences of the democratization of knowledge. Moreover, he saw these themes as historically embedded in America's national fabric, resulting from its colonial and evangelical Protestant heritage. He contended that evangelical American Protestantism's anti-intellectual tradition valued the spirit over intellectual rigor.[5]

> Hofstadter described anti-intellectualism as "resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life."[6] He further described the term as a view that "intellectuals...are pretentious, conceited... and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive ... The plain sense of the common man is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise."[7]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...

[csa]

> in the big welcome event for incoming 9th graders every mention of post high-school life was phrased as "college and career".

1. If the school pulled from a certain kind of socio-economic status population, then this is a reasonable broad statement to make.

2. In other cases, it may just be projection and/or lazy thinking.

3. The US fascination with college eduction, attributing it to higher earnings, conflates correlation with causation. Many of the folks who go to college will also have a financially bright future if they don’t go to college — for example, by monetizing their social network.

4. The case for defaulting to a college education is that many places use it as a filter for job applicants.

5. My recommendation to folks is either go to a school with a well-developed alumni and/or job placement network or go to the cheapest and easiest school that they have access to. Learning isn’t really part of the equation, since it will either be baked into the program they enter, or they can just embrace autonomous/independent learning. The quality of education at middling institutions is just not very good.

6. Note that I believe that the US is producing college graduates at about double the rate that we need. A quick search of data shows that ~40% of folks aged 25-29 in 2022 had a college degree. I think that number should probably be closer to 15-20%… maybe as low as 10%. The only way the waste in the system can be cut is probably from above — using a college degree as a job filter misaligns incentives, imho, and this won’t change easily.