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The Educated vs. People Easily Fooled
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Spartakus View Drop Down
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terörist

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Posts: 4489 		  Quote Spartakus Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: The Educated vs. People Easily Fooled
    Posted: 13-Nov-2008 at 18:48
A very interesting article i came up on the Net:


Forget Red vs. Blue -- It's the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda

By Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Posted November 12, 2008.


Millions of Americans live in a non-reality-based belief system informed by childish clichés - they can barely differentiate between lies and truth.

We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America, which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture. It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by simplistic, childish narratives and cliches. It is thrown into confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities.
...................


http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/106551/forget_red_vs._blue_--_it%27s_the_educated_vs._people_easily_fooled_by_propaganda/?page=1
"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. "
--- Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky, 1991, Russian-American poet, b. St. Petersburg and exiled 1972 (1940-1996)
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Posts: 2091 		  Quote Akolouthos Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 13-Nov-2008 at 19:07
One of the best analyses I've seen of the context in which we think in our culture. The following struck a chord:
 
Hannah Arendt warned that the marketization of culture leads to its degradation, that this marketization creates a new celebrity class of intellectuals who, although well read and informed themselves, see their role in society as persuading the masses that "Hamlet" can be as entertaining as "The Lion King" and perhaps as educational. "Culture," she wrote, "is being destroyed in order to yield entertainment."
 
The implications of the above are dire, and go well beyond convincing people to immerse themselves in culture (as an aside, I would note that Hamlet and other plays were the Lion Kings of their day, and many who would have attended the plays would have been incapable of grasping a lot of the subtlety in them). Often, intellectuals today view themselves in terms of two separate roles: 1) instructing, educating, and passing on culture; and 2) convincing the "masses" to accept their political or ideological beliefs by whatever means necessary. The result is that a professor who is lucid and objective in the classroom becomes as much a sophistic demagogue as the most disingenuous of our politicians. I just wish the author had provided an easy solution.
 
-Akolouthos
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Posts: 2394 		  Quote edgewaters Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 15-Nov-2008 at 09:09
I just wish the author had provided an easy solution.


Well, it's hardly the first time this problem has come up. The solution hasn't changed: better, wider education.
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Posts: 846 		  Quote calvo Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-Nov-2008 at 14:44
I'd like to add that "education" is not the only solution to ignorance; because education on one hand can teach knowledge, open minds, and encourage critical thinking, on the other hand it can teach people to be ignorant and biassed - it all depends on the way education is implemented.
Education, in some senses, is a means of manipulation.
 
What I have noticed among an older generation of Spaniards, the generation who had been educated under Franco's dictatorship. Most of the educated people of this generation came from well-to-do families who benefited from the dictatorship; and education back in those days was dominated by the radically reactionary Catholic Church, who taught a very biassed version of history and current affairs.
I quite often found the "educated" people of this generation to possess highly biassed, nationalistic, authoritarian, Islamophobic, and Catholic fundamentalist views; while the more "ignorant" Spaniards of the same generation were very often more open-minded.
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Posts: 1109 		  Quote Count Belisarius Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-Nov-2008 at 15:11
Known that for a long time I have sad it is


Defenders of Ulthuan, Cult of Asuryan (57 Kills and counting)


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edgewaters View Drop Down
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Posts: 2394 		  Quote edgewaters Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 08-Dec-2008 at 03:45
Originally posted by calvo

I'd like to add that "education" is not the only solution to ignorance; because education on one hand can teach knowledge, open minds, and encourage critical thinking, on the other hand it can teach people to be ignorant and biassed - it all depends on the way education is implemented.
Education, in some senses, is a means of manipulation.

Very, very true. This is why I said "better" education: not education that rams "facts" down the throats of students by repetition (though of course that's necessary for many subjects, such as math or geography) but education that teaches students how to think critically.

The latter has been discouraged, basically because employers, banks, landlords, religious groups, special interest groups, and (not least of all) politicians see it as undesirable (for obvious reasons!). A return to quality education means rolling back the influence of these groups over education, no small feat at all! In fact, given the nature of the interests vested in poor education, prospects for a return to quality education on a mass scale look quite grim.

We may have to start from scratch all over again, just like the first universities and colleges when they began as informal student associations outside of the church schools.
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Posts: 387 		  Quote toyomotor Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 04-Feb-2014 at 04:39
Originally posted by Spartakus

A very interesting article i came up on the Net:
<p ="storyline">Forget Red vs. Blue -- It's the Educated vs. People Easily Fooled by Propaganda


<!-- end: line -->

<!-- start: byline -->
     <p ="storybyline">
     
     
          By
          Chris Hedges,           Truthdig. Posted November 12, 2008.


     
<!-- end: byline -->


<!-- end: line and byline -->

<!-- start: teaser -->
     
          <div ="teaserleft">
Millions of Americans live in a non-reality-based belief system
informed by childish clichés - they can barely differentiate between
lies and truth.We live in two Americas. One America, now the minority, functions in a
print-based, literate world. It can cope with complexity and has the
intellectual tools to separate illusion from truth. The other America,
which constitutes the majority, exists in a non-reality-based belief
system. This America, dependent on skillfully manipulated images for
information, has severed itself from the literate, print-based culture.
It cannot differentiate between lies and truth. It is informed by
simplistic, childish narratives and cliches. It is thrown into
confusion by ambiguity, nuance and self-reflection. This divide, more
than race, class or gender, more than rural or urban, believer or
nonbeliever, red state or blue state, has split the country into
radically distinct, unbridgeable and antagonistic entities....................
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/106551/forget_red_vs._blue_--_it%27s_the_educated_vs._people_easily_fooled_by_propaganda/?page=1


But you haven't even considered those educated people who are easily fooled, and there are many of them. Education is no bar to being fooled, especially by a professional.
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