In a lot of cases it is less anti-science, and more not trusting the claim. It certainly seems used more on the right in some cases (climate change, evolution) but elements on the left are just as bad (vaccines, big pharma, anti depressants, etc).
When a particular subject becomes tainted in their mind, any evidence is based on bad science. It doesn’t help things when mass media screws up study results with wild claims, or takes results from a small study and present them as fact, only to refute it later in another study.
And yet that same Republican majority worships slave labor NCAA football and basketball. They’re happy to cut funding for state universities, but they have no problem with the coaches for those schools getting million dollar paychecks. The fools will never know how foolish they are.
Right, and I didn’t think you were. I’m just pointing out that the politics are often so deeply ingrained in the science that they can be hard to spot.
Interesting article, although it contains nothing very new for anyone vaguely familiar with sociological works of the past decades - Pierre Bourdieu, in particular, comes to mind. The specific details may vary, and it’s interesting to examine them, but the mechanics are well known.
People like neat labels. This is not a good thing, but it’s true. And as labels carry more partisan weight over time, all one can do is associate – or separate – themselves from those labels. A dreadful pathology, but here we are. I can’t say, “I’m a feminist but I support merit- and skill-based immigration laws and am broadly supportive of the 2d Amendment” without having to spend hours trying to explain myself.
This “college” thing, while troubling, seems more derivative of the reflexive need for partisan cheerleading than anything else, especially in a 20 point drop in two years, something else is at work – when you control for incomes/parental education/partisan politics, I doubt there’s any detectible drop of enrollment as between parties. Rather, when you ask people broadly, “college” as some generic has many of the same problems as the word “feminist” – it now carries with it a certain number of specific partisan identities that certain people don’t want to be tarnished with. One can be for equal pay, or be pro-choice, or lots of other things, but since “feminist” suggests necessarily “democrat”, a whole swath of people are never going to accept the term as being applied to them. I probably agree on 95% of things that would style me as a “feminist”, but as a label, in its current form it will never suit me, as it necessarily suggests I’m a fan of, say, Nancy Pelosi or Elizabeth Warren. And I’m not. Easier in daily conversation to say, “no” to “am I feminist” than to get into some cul-de-sac about intersectionality or 3d wave or all these things for which I barely have the vocabulary, let alone much of an opinion.
Sadly, “college” – as the generic – is carrying with it lots of the same things. Whatever my individual actions w/r/t to sending a kid to university, saying that “college” is a good thing might carry with it a suggestion I’m for these other things going on at college. (Middlebury or Missouri or what-have-you). So when I get a call in a poll, isn’t this just a proxy (and a bad one!) for “I’m with the Left” or “I’m with the RIght”? I’ve a number of fancy degrees, but to a pollster I’m likely to chose the answer that says, “i’m not with the person commissioning this poll”
America really has not been able to get its story straight about whether a college degree is a basic credential that everybody should have, or a special distinction for exceptional people.
This is a misrepresentation of the survey questions and results. The survey was on whether different institutions are having a positive or negative impact on the country. They did not ask whether people thought an education was helpful or not. In the same survey, they also asked the same question about banks, unions, churches, and the news media.
I suspect that many of the respondents during the survey were thinking less of MIT and more of Evergreen State, which is of course an outlier.
Germany has high standards in the education of craftspeople. Historically very few people attended college. In the 1950s for example, 80 percent had only Volksschule (“primary school”)-Education of 6 or 7 years […] However, this does not mean that Germany was a country of uneducated people. In fact, many of those who did not receive secondary education were highly skilled craftspeople and members of the upper middle class. Even though more people attend college today, a craftsperson is still highly valued in German society.
so you think those republicans who responded so negatively regarding those places where one gets a higher education would have responded more positively if asked about how they felt regarding higher education in general?
