The Link between Education and Democracy – and How the 2004 Exit Polls Document that Link

[Time for change]

I believe that there are two major and related reasons why Al Gore is so popular on DU these days.

First is a partially symbolic reason: It was Al Gore’s Presidency, stolen from him by George W. Bush (but not without a valiant fight), that gave birth to the idea of the DU, which was founded on George Bush’s inauguration day, January 20, 2000. A statement from “About the Democratic Underground” makes perfectly clear the link between George Bush’s pResidency and the founding of DU:

Democratic Underground (DU) was founded on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2001, to protest the illegitimate presidency of George W. Bush…

This website exists so our members and guests are assured that there are many others across the country who share their outrage at the unilateral, arrogant, and extreme right-wing approach taken by George W. Bush and his team, the conservative Republicans in Congress, and the five conservative partisans on the Supreme Court.

The second and probably more substantive reason for Al Gore’s popularity on DU (and many other liberals/progressives as well) is that over the past several years he has provided a strong voice to warn our nation about its most serious problems.

Gore’s most recent book, “The Assault on Reason”, emphasizes the relationship between the lack of an informed, concerned, and educated citizenry as a major reason for the sorry state of our nation today.


Al Gore on how Americans are becoming less educated today

In the introduction to his book, Gore summarizes the pernicious effects of television. Noting that television became the “dominant source of information in America” in 1963, Gore explains:

All of a sudden, in a single generation, Americans made a dramatic change in their daily routine, and started sitting motionless, staring at flickering images on a screen for more than thirty hours each week. Not only did television take over a larger share of the time and attention Americans devoted to news and information, it began to dominate a larger share of the public sphere as a whole. Moreover, as advertisers quickly discovered, television’s power to motivate changes in behavior was also unprecedented.

Noting how control over television has become concentrated into the hands of a small number of powerful corporations, Gore describes how that has skewed the news that Americans receive today:

These conglomerates are apparently sometimes tempted to bend their news programming choices to support the achievement of commercial objectives. The news divisions – which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network – are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, sometimes, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation that owns them. They have fewer reporters… less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations handouts… For these and other reasons, the U.S. press was recently found in a comprehensive international study to be only the fifty-third freest press in the world… Journalists… are often not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do…

The subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: It leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable…

Gore notes that our Founding Fathers “counted heavily on the ability of a ‘well informed citizenry’ to reason together in ways that would minimize the destructive impact of illusory, exaggerated, or excessive fears.” But that hope of our Founding Fathers is in serious jeopardy today, as Gore explains:

The sharp decline in reading and writing – and the bombardment of every new fear with television commercials and simplistic nostrums disguised as solutions for the indicated fear has given American democracy an immune system disorder that prevents the citizenry from responding precisely, appropriately, and effectively to serious threats to the health of our democracy. So all of a sudden we over-react to illusory threats and under-react to real threats.

The importance of an educated citizenry to democracy

On the importance of education to democracy, Gores says:

The traditional progressive solution to problems that involve a lack of participation by citizens in civic and democratic processes is to redouble their emphasis on education. And education is, in fact, an extremely valuable strategy for solving many of society’s ills… It is also clear that democracies are more likely to succeed when there is widespread access to high-quality education.

The same point is made by Edward Glaeser in an article titled “Why Does Democracy Need Education?” The authors

investigate why stable democracies are rare outside countries with high levels of education… They find that as education increases you have a larger group of people capable and willing to take an active role in politics, giving birth to democracy or further sustaining an already democratic government.

The importance of education to a democracy as revealed by the 2004 U.S. presidential exit polls

Al Gore does not discuss in his book how the Edison-Mitofsky 2004 U.S. presidential exit polls provided convincing evidential support for his ideas on the relationship between democracy and education – perhaps because he felt that such a discussion would seem partisan. But I don’t have to worry too much about sounding partisan, so I’ll discuss it here.

The fact of the matter is that in 2004 those with post-graduate degrees voted for John Kerry in much greater numbers and percentages than those without post-graduate degrees. Here are the raw numbers from the “adjusted” exit polls – which hardly begin to tell the whole story:

Post graduate degree: Kerry 55%; Bush 44%
No post-graduate degree: Kerry 47%; Bush 52%

Much the same pattern was demonstrated in 2000, as those with post-graduate degrees voted for Gore at a rate of 52%, compared with 44% for Bush. But in that year much of the potential Gore vote, especially among those with post-graduate degrees, was siphoned off to Ralph Nader, who received 3% of the vote among that group of voters.

But the relationship between education and an intelligent vote for President in 2004 was much stronger than it would superficially appear from looking at these exit poll numbers – for several reasons:

“Adjusting” the exit polls weakened the magnitude of the difference
The exit poll numbers presented by the Edison-Mitofsky polls were not the actual poll numbers (sorry, no link, I believe it disappeared a long time ago), but rather “adjusted” numbers, based on the “official” election results. Kerry’s lead over Bush among post-graduate voters according to the actual exit poll numbers was 58% to 40%, rather than 55% to 44%.

But before presenting the numbers, Edison and Mitofsky “adjusted” them to fit the “official” vote count, in the process making the assumption that the “official” vote count was accurate and the exit polls were wrong. The point is that according to the exit polls John Kerry won the 2004 election over George Bush by a full 3%. So in order to make the exit polls consistent with the “official” results of the election, Edison and Mitofsky had to “adjust” the numbers. They apparently believed, in other words, that the exit polls were accurate enough that it was legitimate to present the relative share of the vote among different demographic groups, even though their “adjustment” of the numbers was rationalized by the assumption that the main result of the exit polls (that is, who won the election) was wrong.

The bottom line being that the unadjusted exit polls showed John Kerry with a 58% to 41% lead over George Bush among post-graduate voters.

The role of income
The second point to consider is that there was a very strong relationship between income and voting for George Bush. Here are the numbers for George Bush’s share of the vote in 2004 by income level:

0-$15,000: 36% vote for Bush
$15,000 - $30,000: 42% vote for Bush
$30,000 - $50,000: 49% vote for Bush
$50,000 - $100,000: 56% vote for Bush
$100,000 - $200,000: 57% vote for Bush
$200,000 or more: 63% vote for Bush

The reason for the strong correlation between income and voting for Bush is not hard to understand, since it is well known that every one of Bush’s policy initiatives favored the rich over the poor.

But these poll numbers have great relevance to the education poll numbers. Since there is a well known and strong correlation between income and education, one would normally expect that income and education would show similar relationships to voting patterns. The fact that they in fact showed opposite patterns in 2004 (and 2000 as well) is very revealing. What that demonstrates is that the correlation of both income (those with higher incomes voting for Bush) and education (those with more education voting for Kerry) with their respective voting patterns was actually much stronger than it appeared – since the income and education pattern tended to partially cancel each other out. In other words, within any individual income level, the strong relationship between higher education and Kerry voting would be much stronger than the overall relationship between higher education and Kerry voting. Unfortunately, Edison and Mitofsky did not present data which would have enabled the stronger relationship between education and Kerry voting to be precisely calculated.

Formal education doesn’t tell the whole story
The poll question that Edison and Mitofsky asked concerned only the level of formal education. Formal education is important to a democracy. But more relevant poll questions (from the standpoint of assessing one’s ability to make informed voting decisions) would have probed the level of knowledge that voters had about the important political questions of the day. As Al Gore points out:

Education alone, however, is necessary but insufficient. A well educated citizenry is more likely to be a well-informed citizenry, but the two concepts are entirely different… It is possible to be extremely well educated and, at the same time, ill informed or misinformed…

If well educated citizens have no effective way to communicate their ideas to others and no realistic prospect of catalyzing the formation of a critical mass of opinion supporting their ideas, then their education is for naught where the vitality of our democracy is concerned.

The remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education… but the reestablishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way – a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response…

A well-connected citizenry is made up of men and women who discuss and debate ideas and issues among themselves and who constantly test the validity of the information and impressions they receive from one another – as well as the ones they receive from their government. No citizenry can be well informed without a constant flow of honest information about contemporary events and without a full opportunity to participate in a discussion of the choices that the society must make.

So, the failure to look at a more relevant measure of education means that the assessment by the Edison-Mitofsky polls of the relationship between education and making an intelligent choice in the ballot box was bound to show a much weaker relationship than that which in fact exists. For example, there are many DUers (I’m guessing here) whose formal educational level is low, but who nevertheless are much more informed about today’s important political matters than their formal level of education would predict. A poll of DUers regarding their 2004 vote for President would have shown a much wider margin in favor of John Kerry than the Edison-Mitofski poll of post-graduate voters did (OK, that’s a partisan example, and not 100% valid, but the general point is valid).


The consequences

The consequences of our uninformed citizenry have been tragic and are likely to be catastrophic if not improved before too long: The percentage of Americans who vote in our national elections is abysmally low; in 2000 and again in 2004 enough Americans voted for two of the vilest men ever to disgrace our nation, for the highest offices in the land, that those elections were close enough to steal – which they were; and although the vast majority of DUers, and many other Americans as well, are outraged about much of what our leaders have done in our name over the past several years, still not enough Americans are adequately outraged about that. As Al Gore explains:

The disclosure that our government had been cruelly and routinely torturing captured prisoners – and was continuing to do so as official policy – provoked surprisingly little public outcry, even though it threatened America’s values and moral authority in the world… The majority of citizens were led to wholeheartedly approve and endorse the invasion of a country (Iraq) that did not attack us and posed no threat to us.

Thus we currently live under the most lawless presidential administration in our history, and yet not enough Americans are demanding that their elected Congressional representatives take the necessary actions to rid us of this plague.

[illinoisprogressive]

1. It's about closure and that we dems pick people you cannot connect with.

we always chose the candidate that you cannot warm up to. This is a big problem for us in that we have had our asses kicked by this factor.
We yearn for Gore because we feel a sense of needing to make things right from 2000. We need closure.

[Time for change]

7. Closure

But I don't think it's fair to say that we pick candidates that you can't warm up to.

I think that it's more accurate to say that no matter whom the Democrats pick, the corporate newsmedia castigates mercilessly, thereby propagating a myth that there the Democratic candidate has some fatal flaws that makes him unqualified for the presidency.

They did that with McGovern, and they did that with Gore. And they'll do that no matter whom we nominate in 2008.

I believe that Gore has grown a lot since his 2000 campaign. I got kind of upset with him in 2000 for constantly talking about the middle class and never talking about the poor -- as if they didn't exist. But it wasn't that he didn't care about them. He was just trying to play it safe, in order to get elected.

Now he's taken off the gloves, and he says whatever he believes. I believe that he will make a very fine, if not a great President.

[bleever]

2. K&R,

...and looking forward to reading the comments.

[Time for change]

29. Thank you bleever --

Looks like this has generated a lot of good discussion.

[bleever]

33. It's interesting to note that valuable discussion is not measured, always,

by recommendations or responses.

DUer merh once had a great post about how good things have a ripple effect, spreading far beyond the initial point of origination.

:thumbsup:

[bricolage]

3. I thought the more education you have, the more money you make.

The findings in this poll are surprising in that regard. More educated people went for Gore and Kerry. Wealthier people went for Bush.

Is it possible that most post-graduates are in academia which is generally liberal?

[Igel]

4. In my experience, there's a split among grad students.

Those in the hard sciences and engineering(s) tend to be a tad conservative, those in the social sciences and humanities tend to be quite liberal.

Get a grad degree in psychology, English, or Geography, and you're less likely to be in the $100k/year salary range: Most graduates don't get jobs in their fields. Get one in Electrical Engineering, and you'll probably be over the $50k/yr range.

While this is just speculation, it would help account for the paradox everybody's seeing. What's needed to test my guess isn't "post-grad degree" voter numbers, but a breakdown of who voted for which candidate by discipline.

[bricolage]

5. That makes sense, Igil.

[Yupster]

10. I think you're right on, but

what the other poster said is true also.

In the local college near me, the number of graduate degrees in education dwarfs the grad degrees given out in any other subject, probably all other subjects put together. Not hard to believe since most teachers get post-grad degrees and the local school district is the largest employer in almost every community.

Therefore while true that post grad degree makes you a likely Democratic voter, I think it's more the profession of educator than the secondary degree that makes you that way.

If the survey results are telling us that educators are a Democratic Party base, it's less than overwhelming information.

[Time for change]

6. It is generally true that more education is correlated with more money

The correlation certainly isn't 100%, but it is a very strong correlation nonetheless. Certainly there are many very highly educated people who have only modest annual salaries, but it is unusual to find people with post-graduate degrees who make less money than people without a high school education. Yet people with post-graduate degrees voted for Kerry in much higher numbers than those without a high school education.

The findings in this poll are indeed surprising in that regard. What it means is that education produced a very strong tendency to vote against Bush (or for Kerry and Gore), despite the fact that in general most of those people made more money than people with lesser education.

[bricolage]

8. Actually Gore and Kerry won both groups.

Both the post grad folks and the high-school dropouts.

[TheMadMonk]

15. Money implies education. The converse does not.

Therein lies another part of the "disparity".

[Time for change]

17. I'm not sure what your point is

Neither money nor education absolutely implies the other. One can make a great deal of money without a great deal of education, especially if one has the right political connections. Or, one can be highly educated and have a post-graduate degree without making a lot of money, especially if one chooses to work in a job because of the inherant quality of the work involved or its potential to benefit humanity, but which doesn't pay very well.

Nevertheless, there is a strong correlation between money and education because education provides an opportunity to make more money, and money provides the opportunity for more education. It is because of that strong correlation that the opposite association that they have with each other with respect to voting patterns means that the voting pattern associated with each is considerably stronger than it would appear at first glance.

My main point was only that education, especially to the extent that it reflects being well informed about the important political issues of the day, has a strong and positive effect on a citizen's ability to make intelligent choices in the voting booth.

[MedleyMisty]

9. Education does not equal intelligence

I have a two year associate's degree.

I was tested for the gifted program in elementary school. I don't remember the first test very well, but I do remember the re-test in fifth grade and the results that said I was working at a college level and above. I got a 570 verbal score on the SAT in 7th grade, before the 1994 recentering. That was without any grade acceleration or extra activities in school or even any parent pushing.

But my parents worked in mills, my father died when I was little, and my mother lost her job due to NAFTA. Even with that, I made it to UNC. But then I had sort of a mental breakdown. Anyway....

I know that's all meaningless personal anecdote and I'm not using it as part of a debate. More just sort of pointing out that while education does broaden your mind it does not necessarily equal intelligence (especially in the US with an education system as fucked up as its health system - maybe Moore's next film should be titled Stupid).

I guess I'm more just sort of agreeing with your point that formal education does not tell the whole story and is not the whole solution.

I know that we like to rag on the sheeple here. I've done it myself a few times, because it gets so frustrating beating your head against a brick wall.

But in the end, they're not really stupid and they're not really really wilfully ignorant, although it may seem like it. They are intentionally dumbed down in school (like I said, that should be Moore's next topic) and mass culture does everything it can to reinforce anti-intellectualism and almost all mass media news is straight up propaganda. And all of us here are damn lucky that we have the money for a computer and net connection and the time to sit and read stuff on DU and keep up and keep informed.

We've got the change the culture somehow.

Off to bed. I'll think some and maybe post more tomorrow.

[Time for change]

13. I believe that the blame should be shared between the sheeple and the corporate news media

The corporate news media neglects their responsibility to provide the American people with the information they need to make intelligent decisions.

And the sheeple Bushbots simply accept that without making an effort to inform themselves.

Neither are without blame IMO.

[hfojvt]

11. about how DUers voted

First, I am the 57,000th registered DUer out of 105,000 registrations today, and I, like yourself, registered AFTER the 2004 election. Whatever I was using to keep informed before 2004, it was not DU, except for the top 10 Conservative Idiots - I read that every week. In 2000 though, there was no DU and still almost all of us probably voted for Gore (or Nader and not including the young 'uns who were under 18 in 2000.) But I am one of those anomalies too - a person with an MA who makes less than $25K.

[Time for change]

19. DU voters

Yes, obviously nobody used the DU to help them make the decision to vote for Gore in 2000 -- but maybe the DU will play some positive role in his 2008 candidacy.

I do think though that the average DUer was substantially more informed than the average American, even prior to the creation of DU. And after it was created, that has helped us to keep even more informed -- I know that it's helped ME quite a bit.

It is largely people like you whom I refer to in this post, as demonstrating the fact that those with higher levels of education, associated with higher levels of awareness of what goes on in the world, are much more likely to vote for Gore or Kerry than for Bush.

[warren pease]

12. Gore advocates for a functional marketplace of ideas...

As he's quoted above, the country lacks both the means and the literacy levels necessary for "...a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response…"

This seems like a plea to revisit the old concept of a marketplace of ideas, in which all plans, schemes and ideologies, no matter how ridiculous or illogical, are fair game for discussion.

The marketplace of ideas assumes two non-optional components: The marketplace is free and open to all ideas, no matter from whom and no matter how weird. And the "consumers" are informed, educated, intelligent and capable of selecting one idea from among thousands of competing thoughts based on the validity of the idea itself -- no PR, no advertising, no positioning, no pandering, no spin.

The internet seems to meet the first requirement, although it's limited in that participants must either be able to afford their own computer or have access to one, live in a place with the appropriate telecom infrastructure, know how to use it well enough to connect to the internet, and have the means to pay for that access. Still, those barriers are falling all over the world and, as a result, there is a forum for the marketplace of ideas to peddle the full range of its wares.

However, a true marketplace of ideas capable of reaching everyone who wished to tap in would by definition have to include TV, print media and radio. Since those media are virtually all under the control of large corporations whose vested interest in the status quo makes advocacy of the conservative world view inevitable, and unbiased presentation of a full range of opinion out of the question, I would argue that the marketplace of ideas doesn't really exist in any useful sense, at least in this country.

As to the second requirement, as Gore points out, polls consistently show that TV news is the sole or primary source of information for about 92 percent of Americans. So passive consumers of ideas are lulled to sleep by the continuous repetition of narrow points of view that almost universally support the status quo. Active consumers can turn to the internet as an alternative to TV news, but the above-mentioned polls suggest that at most 8 percent do so as their primary source of information.

Add to that the hideous state of public education in this country, the diminishing time people have to do anything but work, pay bills and "put food on their family," the complete absence of "un-spun" reporting in conventional media, the horrible morphing of the press into a cheerleading corps of status quo stenographers and, to seal the deal, the absolute dominance of the AM and FM bands by right wing hate speech -- consider all these and I suggest the average American idea consumer lacks both adequate information and the basic critical thinking skills necessary to separate spun bullshit from fact.

Ideas can compete in a fair fight, and I'd be surprised if progressive positions didn't swamp wingnut ranting if given an equal hearing. The problem is that anyone who uses mass media -- particularly TV -- as their sole source of information can go weeks, months or even years without hearing a progressive viewpoint, unless it's voiced by that candy ass Colmes who exists solely to portray liberals as dipshits that the mighty Hannity can whip with one frontal lobe tied behind his back.

If the marketplace of ideas is to ever become functional in this country, the choke-hold corporate America has on the means of information distribution must end. The 1996 Telecom Act, which essentially gave federal blessing to media consolidation practices that would be prosecuted as monopolistic in most other industries, must be invalidated. I think the effects of the Fairness Doctrine were overrated, but it wouldn't hurt to revisit that concept again and try to improve on the previous version.

And perhaps most importantly, Rupert Murdoch must be taken by boat to the deepest part of the Mariannas Trench and booted over the side with lead weights firmly attached to limbs, neck and torso. That act alone would do much to clean up the current media cesspool. And perhaps Roger Ailes could be invited along as well.

Actually, if you managed to round up all the guilty bastards who've had a role in destroying intelligent discourse in this country, you'd need the QE II to hold them all.


wp

[Time for change]

16. Yes, those are excellent points

I think that one of the most hopeful points, as you note, is that the barriers to internet use are falling all over the world. It is the internet, in fact, that Gore holds out as the major hope for turning this around. You counter you own hopeful statement by saying that a true marketplace of ideas would have to include TV, print and radio. But I don't believe that is necessarily so, as long as a critical mass of people come to obtain their news through the internet. It doesn't have to be everyone -- just enough people to exert the political influence necessary to break the current monopoly held by the corporations, and turn things around.

Our current problem is that we are in the midst of a downward vicious cycle. The conservatives have control of the media and the political process. Those reinforce each other because they use the media to enhance their political standing and they use the political process to enact laws (like the Telecommunications Act of 1996) that ensure their continuing monopolization of the media. I discuss those issues in this post.

It is true that our current education system is poor, and the fact that only 8% of people primarily obtain their news through the internet poses a big barrier. But that percent is growing, and there is no reason to believe that I can see that it will not be possible for that 8% to rise to much higher levels.

I haven't finished Gore's book yet. I assume that he has some concrete suggestions for reaching the goals he speaks of. The vicious cycle must be broken, as you suggest, including the monopolization of the media engendered by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. There are many possibilities. Slavery used to be legal in this country, and now it isn't. That is a big improvement, and there have been many more as well.

[warren pease]

22. Slavery's illegal? BushCo will fix that before leaving (if they ever do)

I could have sworn that between H-1B visas, "off-shoring," "out-sourcing," mass layoffs, union busting, crushing consumer debt loads, abandonment of 3/5 of the Bill of Rights and a bunch of other anti-labor, anti-citizen moves by our corporate masters and their employees throughout government and federal regulatory agencies -- I could have sworn that slavery was the logical next step.

Its precursor, indentured servitude, is making a big comeback in places like Saipan, where the shanghaied workers aren't literally slaves, but their indenture bond to their US corporate "benefactors" is so high that they'll never pay it off, which means they're de facto slaves for life. This is what Tom DeLay meant when he said Saipan's official backing of unrestrained, rapacious capitalism is "... a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market system"

In a subsequent interview, he characterized the low-wage, anti-union conditions of the Marianas (Saipan's island chain) constituted "a perfect petri dish of capitalism. It's like my Galapagos Island."


But anyway, that's not what I called about. I'm curious about the composition of that group that uses the Internet as its primary source of news and general information. I'm concerned that, while many people quickly learn which sites are reputable and which are Drudge clones, most people only visit sites that reflect their political/ideological biases.

It's kind of like talk radio. I have literally never heard or read anything by Limbaugh, Hannity, O'Reilly, Coulter or any of the other wingnut motormouths who generate so much disgust and anger around here. On the other hand, I've been listening to AAR since its inception (less since its recent moves toward the middle), and before that the local Pacifica affiliate. So I'm as saturated with left-leaning ideology as the right is with theirs. And I will never, under any circumstances, listen to any of these charlatans, unless it's a recording of their on-air death due to apoplexy.

So the polarization of opinion and bias just migrates to the web, although liberal/progressive/left/radical/anarchist perspectives seem far more prolific than in conventional media (of course, anything's greater than zero), while the bumbling efforts of the right to seem literate and logical are represented by sites like FreeRepublic, where every other word is either misused or misspelled, where "screwn" and "moran" were born, and where "God bless GWB" passes for a cogent argument.

So I'm starting to wonder if the internet is, after all, a key part of the cure for all the disinterest in politics, hostility to alternative viewpoints, religion, xenophobia and racism, and general ignorance of conditions and events throughout the world, including right here in Paris Hilton Land.

Rather, it's setting up as just another bi-polar attack machine, where the argument itself is subordinate to its advocate, and where reflexive hatred and scorn for "the other side" poisons any potential for consensus on even the most basic issues.

For example, looking at the DU demographics study the admins put together recently, it seems many of us are living quite well. If I remember correctly, more than half of us make between than $60K and $125K annually. Yet class consciousness is very evident here. We seem to understand that, while many of us are doing OK to pretty well, we're hardly the economic masters of the universe. And we recognize the severity of the problems created by extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of the upper 3 to 5 percent.

On the other hand, if for no other reason than that it's discussed on DU, class consciousness has to be negated by FR and its thousands of kindred sites. And this even though it's obvious from spelling, punctuation, chronic illogic, and childlike reasoning capabilities, that these people aren't among the economic elite either.

Group theory and common sense says we have more in common with freeps than with the people who use their economic and political clout to ruin the lives of many and diminish the lives of almost all. We and the freeps, in turn, have far more in common with poor Blacks and Hispanics than we do with well-to-do white upper middle class suburbanites.

Trouble is, and always has been, smart elites understand that if every oppressed group they've ever "screwn" banded together to depose them, they'd be hanging from the nearest lamppost before the hour was up. So they do what rulers and governments have done since economic classes began to separate out from the general population: they divide and conquer. They use racism and xenophobia -- two ugly characteristics the US has in profusion -- along with misogyny, regionalism, education levels, income, collar color, and a host of other artificial dividers to keep people from building bridges to other groups and, the ruling class' chief horror, finding common ground and maybe even building a movement to take back from the thieving bastards what they've stolen from the rest of us -- through the tax code; through withholding decent wages; through mergers and acquisitions; through dismantling the domestic economy by buying up viable businesses, then laying off all the workers and selling everything that's not nailed down.

They've got a lot to answer for, and as long as the population is at war with itself, they're going to continue to get away with their predations.

Which finally leads us back to the Internet. If it's to become a unifying force for the betterment of humankind, rather than just a new dumping ground for the same old prejudices and ethnic hatreds, then it's no better than TV news.

I don't have a solution, of course, since that would require actual intelligence on my part. But that's the problem as I see it, and until we start building consensus among groups that have been socialized to detest each other, and somehow manage to coalesce these groups around addressing a set of problems common to us all, we're still just playing by the rules for social control established in pre-history and followed scrupulously by the governmental and economic elites to this day.


wp

[Time for change]

25. The SOLUTION

Just kidding. This is a very complicated issue, and the solution is a long way off.

Al Gore believes that the internet is a big improvement over TV for a number of reasons, and I am inclined to agree with him, though I haven't finished reading his book yet. The internet is much more interactive than TV, and the use of it is much more active, as compared with TV, which is entirely passive. People have the opportunity to pick and choose and to surf around so as to assess the accuracy of what people say.

Your point is a valid one that much of the internet is polarized. You make the point that many of us on the left, including yourself, are largely exposed to points of view that corroborate our own. There is certainly a lot of truth in that, but only to a certain extent. I once posted an essay on DU advocating that conservatives be allowed to post on DU, for that very reason, and my post was met with a great deal of hostility, though there were enough people who agreed with me that it eked onto the greatest page. I also try to read books with right wing points of view on occasion, though my tolerance for that is somewhat limited. I will read a right wing book if I believe at least that the author is sincere about what s/he is writing. I certainly won't buy anything by Rush or Ann Coulter.

But on DU there are a wide variety of views, and there is discussion, and there are links to other articles that we can read. One thing that I was very much against was the recent experiment where people are allowed to "block" specified people from responding to their posts. I think that that would very much weaken the value of DU, since it would without freedom to disagree with other posters without being blocked, it would be that much more difficult to assess what we read here. In other words, free discussions serve somewhat as a peer review process.

Perhaps I'm being biased in saying this, but I do believe that I have learned a lot on DU and very much expanded my political outlook, rather than narrowed it by exposing myself to a concentrated left wing outlook.

[TheMadMonk]

14. And hasn't real news been more or less banned from the classroom?

I seem to recall numerous stories of students who were prevented from introducing controversial subjects in the papers (or other media) into classroom discussions.

[LWolf]

18. No, "real" news has not been banned from classrooms.

:eyes:

I could dispute how "real" the news we get is, but it isn't banned.

We have newspapers in classrooms, and, when technology is available, newscasts as well. Personally, I wouldn't show tv news in my classroom because I consider it to be dumbed-down sound-bites of controlled content, but I know teachers that do.

[Karenina]

20. CRITICAL THINKING

is what has been banned.

[Mojorabbit]

21. When I was in high school in the 70's

Civics and political science was taught by the coach. It was a worthless class. I think there are a lot of well educated people who lack knowledge in this area.

[Larry Ogg]

23. I think the key word was informed...

Is it possible that those with a higher education are more inclined to have a computer with access to the internet? And then there are those who are intelligent enough to achieve higher education but missed the opportunity for lack of finance or the prodding of parental influence to go after a higher education.

I am not what one would consider as well educated, but I guess I can be included as one of those DUers you mentioned as “Whose formal educational level is low, but who nevertheless are much more informed about today’s important political matters than their formal level of education would predict.” Maybe there is a reason for that…

Being at the bottom rung of the ladder makes one look for a way up! I once heard it said, that “Life is like a dog sled team, and if you’re not the lead dog the scenery never changes.” I’m not saying I would like to be the lead dog, but I can say I have seen a lot of dam stupid but well educated and uninformed people at the front of the pack reaping the rewards, steeling the credit and welth, and kicking the teeth in of the hard working but less educated blue collar working class tax payers. I might not be well educated but I do have a high priority to be informed about these fools that want to be the lead dog. And I will have a computer and internet access to stay informed, long before I have a TV and cable that gives me 150 channels of sports, fantasy’s and lies…

[Time for change]

26. So true!

The current "elites" of our country may have a lot more formal education than most people, and they most certainly have a great deal more money, but they certainly don't have much of anything intelligent to say.

The point you make perfectly illustrates one reason why so many DUers have so much contempt for Bush and Cheney. Despite their formal education, an intelligent sentence is rarely heard to pass their lips. I don't believe that it's because they're not intelligent either. Rather, they have been so corrupted to their very core that they're almost incapable of saying anything that doesn't have a malignant purpose behind it.

[Larry Ogg]

30. I also think there was something important left out of this poll that might have been interesting...

Of all these highly educated people, what was the political affiliation of their parents and family, how were they raised, what was their economic status prior to having the opportunity at a higher education? Certainly we could predict how most Ivy League graduates would vote, but what about the farmer or carpenter or mechanics son or daughter who was the first collage graduate in the family tree? My Son Just graduated from Arizona State University and is now a teacher. He is the first in my family, my late father with a sixth grade education often worked 18 hours a day 7 days a weak to support 7 kids, he managed to make three people millionaires but not himself, he and my late mother would have been be so proud of their grandson…

[Time for change]

31. Congratulations to you son!

Those additional elements to the poll that you mention would have been interesting to analyze. But I'm afraid that most polling companies would consider it too expensive. They're generally after a more superficial analysis.

[PinkyisBlue]

24. This is another thoughtful, insightful essay discussing an issue in America today.

From Gore's book:

"...It is possible to be extremely well educated and, at the same time, ill informed or misinformed..."
Do you think he's talking about the Bushbots or what?

I believe that education is not necessarily linked to money. As another poster stated, most teachers have advanced degrees and are not especially well paid. Many people who work in social service, environmental, and humanitarian-centered occupations have advanced degrees as well and are not well compensated financially. However, many people in the trades (carpenters, plumbers, builders, developers, etc) or those who work for police or fire departments may not have advanced degrees but, due to lucrative contracts or overtime pay, may be paid very well.

I agree with the poster who said there's a lack of critical thinking. It's important to be well educated, but we must also learn to analyze what we read and hear.

[Time for change]

28. "It's important to be well educated, but we must also learn to analyze what we read and hear. "

Yes, I believe that was Gore's main point.

My discussion of the exit polls of course could not take into account peoples' ability to analyze what they read and hear. Formal education is the best we can do to measure than in an exit poll. If we did a study that actually assessed peoples' ability to analyze what they hear and read, the percentage of people who could do that who voted for Bush would most certainly be much smaller than what was demonstrated in the exit poll results with respect to post-graduate education.

And yes, when Gore said "...It is possible to be extremely well educated and, at the same time, ill informed or misinformed...", Bushbots are exactly what he had in mind, and he makes that quite clear, though he never uses that term.

[MedleyMisty]

27. Had more time and read the whole post

I still think that my first post was all right and that we do need to change the culture and the educational system.

The question, of course, is how to do that.

I don't know what I can do without money and power. All I can think of is little stuff - don't pick on "nerds". Don't go all bug eyed crazy at the mention of the word "gifted". Don't tell someone who pays attention to current events and reads books that they're trying to be "better" than other people. Don't call someone pompous just because they have a decent vocabulary or good taste. Don't judge the value of a person's life by their intelligence, in either direction. Thinking that gifted education is a horrible nasty elitist thing is just as bad as being an elitist snob because your kid is gifted.

Oh, and I hate it when people get all social Darwinist and go, "If you's so smart why ain't you rich?" So we need to work on the wrong-headed perception that intelligence equals income or success or whatever. I think that feeds into the smart = snob thing, because for some reason people think that only rich people can be smart and so smart poor kids are in a terrible situation. No opportunities to develop their gifts and social rejection and abuse if they try to do what they can on their own.

On the gifted forum I post on, I related my life story and someone sent me a PM saying that they couldn't believe that someone as smart as me came from such low poor people. I came very close to blowing up and putting that poster on ignore and even posting a personal calling out on the forums. But I didn't and I gave her a chance and now I see that really she's a decent person with some wrong stereotypes and prejudices. I think that's probably true for most humans even if it's hard for me to remember it most of the time.

Essentially we need to blow open the Horatio Alger myth and show everyone that we live in a society that's mostly still feudal.

Write letters about NCLB and tell your newspaper and your representatives that it needs to go. Support weird stuff in school like art and music and literature and other "unnecessary" subjects. Maybe if you're lucky and have money, contribute to a fund or something to help underprivileged smart kids like the one I used to be get post graduate degrees. Write more letters about how everyone deserves free education.

I admit that I don't know how to fight the great monolithic evil that is the military industrial complex and its servants the government and the media. I am trying my best to figure out a way but I haven't arrived at it yet. All I've got is small local grass roots stuff - just trying to change the perceptions of a few people in hopes that maybe they'll change other people's perceptions until eventually the majority of Americans respect reason and the intellect. Fight the media images whenever you can. Fight the general anti-intellectualism whenever you can. Fight the social class as intelligence idea. Try to show people that being smart and informed and aware is cool, that there's nothing wrong with being introverted and reading books and being good at "school stuff" and that there's no need to have self-esteem or pressure issues or go crazy about "labels". Intelligence is not personal worth. It's just another difference that makes us individuals.

I learned how to play chess when I was two. I was doing my brother's senior English homework for him in second grade. There are still many differences now as an adult but they don't fit into the social Darwinist view of life so they don't really bother other people, but anyway. I don't get how that makes me "better" than other people. Why does that threaten others? It shouldn't. Differences should be celebrated. My strength in intellectual areas does not in any sort of way take away from someone else's strength in leadership or sports or creative arts or working with their hands or caring for people.

So, to sum up - at the moment I can only suggest doing all you can in your personal sphere of influence to try to push a positive view of reason and intelligence and intellectual pursuits. And it's something that I don't have a lot of experience with because my rural northwestern North Carolina school friends were very accepting of me and respected my intellect and didn't see me as a threat. Actually my first experience of the "What, do ya think yore better'n us?" type thing was on the net, and I was fairly popular in school.

I grew up with the kind of environment that I'd like to see all over the country, at least when it comes to attitude about intelligence. Of course my school didn't do much for me and Duke's TIP program was interesting but not really a challenge either and never having been challenged has not helped me in adult life, but at least I wasn't made fun of and abused because I was intelligent.

Change the attitude and perhaps the changes in education will be desired by the general population. Of course then we run into the problem of how to get what we want from a government run by corporations, but at least we would have gotten over the public opinion hurdle.

And as for Gore being popular on DU - I've read somewhere that people will generally only follow a leader whose IQ is within 30 points of their own. I know all the problems people have with the concept of IQ, but in general I use it to just mean standard deviations from the norm, with no value judgements or exact numbers or really test results or anything like that in mind. I also think that it's as much nurture as it is nature and it's not that the majority of Americans are genetically of lower IQ. It's just that our society celebrates ignorance and apathy. Change that, and maybe we can change the world.

[Time for change]

32. "Our society celebrates ignorance and apathy. Change that, and maybe we can change the world."

I believe that is true. And our current pResident provides no better example, by virtue of the fact that such a low-life could get tens of millions of people to vote for him -- of course with a great assist from the corporate news media.