Here’s another reason for the docility of the post-60s generations: they’ve had more schooling, and a study of people who quit smoking shows that educated people are more easily influenced by others.
That makes sense. The point of schooling is to hook people into the system of official attitude and belief rather than leaving them to their own devices. So the more schooling there is, and the more society becomes an educational meritocracy, the more people will accept whatever the official line happens to be. To reject it is to join the ranks of the uneducated, irrational, and low class.
UPDATE: An example of the effect of formal education on beliefs and attitudes: people with more of it are much less likely to say that blacks are poorer because they have less innate learning ability. Only 2.8% of those with graduate degrees, as opposed to 20.2% of high school dropouts, say that lesser black prosperity is due to lesser black learning ability. It’s not clear just what the question was, though, and in an area like this exact wording could matter a great deal.
Which is, of course, why the
Which is, of course, why the modern, managerial State cannot tolerate home-schooling, and will do whatever they can to discourage it, and where possible, such as in Germany, even forbidding it.
Education and gullibility:
More schooling isn’t a sufficient condition for the maturation of an educated mind, and docility isn’t contingent upon the amount of time spent being educated.
A study purporting to show that a group of educated people is more likely to be gullible (i.e. influenced by the behaviour of others) than an ignorant group would be, doesn’t make sense to me. At least it makes no sense on what I understand by an ‘educated’ person.
If “educated” means “someone
If “educated” means “someone who’s been through a long process designed to inculcate official beliefs and attitudes that are often at odds with social tradition and even common sense” then it makes a great deal of sense that such a person would be more likely to be influenced by the views of others, at least when those views have official support. He wouldn’t look to what seems right to him but to what seems right to others, especially others with authority.
Educated Parrots
Someone who has been trained to parrot ‘official opinions’ by a so-called educational process that inculcates only the liberal nostrums of the hour, isn’t an ‘educated’ person.
A habit of critical thought and independent judgment distinguishes the educated mind.
The situation is worse than you think
Some thoughts:
A minority of free men
While it’s true that modern educational institutions condition most students to slot into the big machine and to embrace the utilitarian values by which it’s lubricated, the process is not totally effective. The trend can be and is bucked by a minority of free men and women – who can be described as such because they’ve acquired a capacity for independent thought and disinterested inquiry. Since you can see this problem ‘in the round’, you must, I assume, count yourself among the minority of people whose individuality, belief in transcendent values, and critical intelligence have not been destroyed by a college education.
Perhaps the aims of a liberal education have been always realizable only in that minority that possesses the inherent qualities of mind and character to benefit from it. Gibbon said that the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy – except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous. In other words, free men are not and never have been conspicuous by their abundance.
It’s hard to lift yourself by your bootstraps
I can’t help but think though that the times are particularly bad for freedom and independence of mind.
Without discussion, criticism and responsibility those things become crankishness. In other words, freedom and independence of mind need a social setting. That’s why there are phrases like “the republic of letters.” I don’t see where the setting is today. Weblogs? Mass higher education and bureaucratized expertise crowd them out, and the absence of any class for whom they serve a social function make them unreliable and hard to find. They become a hobby for individuals, in a time in which such things have a purely private and subjective function.