Intelligence and education are not the same thing. And talking about education is difficult, because we lost the vocabulary and context in which education was foreshadowed by the enlightenment and framed in the early 19th century.
Education, so quote from the Wikipedia, is acquiring the means of realizing individual possibility. This resonates with the ideas of individualism so cherished by the right-wingers, but they ignore that education must undeniably include a certain cultivation of the mind and character. People obviously cannot be considered educated unless, regardless of their material circumstances, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens.
In a nutshell, we can have people who went to famous schools like Eaton, Harvard, la Sorbonne but did not acquire the means to grow their mind and their character. Sadly, we can find schools of thoughts at the famous schools of education who refuse the education of the character - which propagate, which proliferate, and which propagandise.
At the same time we can find blue-collar workers in lowly jobs who never received higher formal ‘education’, but who built both their knowledge as well as their mind and character. This was the ideal of the ealy 20th centuries reformers. The schools of thoughts mentioned above formed themselves, in my opinion, out of the particular urge to prevent that this came to fruition. Education for the masses, true education, education which includes ethics, mindfulness, open-mindedness, and worst of all: action out of this! - that kind of education is, in fact, what many educational systems around the world are formed to prevent.
Remember that other topic of late?
If you don’t control education, you cannot control the future.
I think that’s, in a wall of text, what was said above:
(These are not technically a form of education, these are at the core of education. If you do not cultivate these, if you do even discourage these, you are not educating, but indoctrinateing.
And that’s what’s happening. And it has been happening for much longer than the above-quoted ideals of education have been sent in that letter.
ETA, since we are technically on the Corona topic:
Parents with higher level education were more likely to hesitate to vaccinate their children against COVID-19.
Well, yeah. Observable in Germany as well, by overlaying sociological data with geographic data of infections. I’ve seen some some rough and I think still unpublished research results at the University of Duisburg-Essen, which was rather two-fold in that regard. High levels of continuous infections in “poor” neighborhoods, and high levels of vaccination hesitancy in quite well-off neighborhoods, resulting in strong but somewhat confined outbreaks. It fits my narrative that formal education is in no way translating to being intelligent, ethical, and self-aware.
