It’s not just higher education. With their voucher system they want to send kids to Christian religious schools.
This bizzare push to keep children/young adults from having the choice to leave the worldviews and religions of their parents is gaining much more mainstream political support than I would have thought. It’s weird and worrying. I think we need a strong push for children’s rights alongside academic freedom.
Modern conservative ideology in the US and Europe is entirely irrational and unappealing to younger people who have even a modicum of real world exposure. As such, conservatives have had to accept that they cannot win support from newer generations on the merits of their beliefs and opinions, and their core demographic is aging out. The alternative is to simply remove the availability of conflicting worldviews altogether. They can’t win the argument, so they want to prevent people from being able to have it at all.
This is also why Republicans have recently started calling for raising the voting age. 18 year olds are coming to voting age in a world where they fear for their lives and where they see their freedoms being eroded. The Republican position on this essentially amounts to “yeah, and?” Which isn’t a particularly compelling argument to support them. So the GOP’s solution is to just remove the voices of the people they disagree with.
They twist it as parents rights. I even saw a tshirt (school protestor) that said “We the parents”.
Wild. It’s just regular abuser thinking dressed up in a fancy costume.
Holy fuck. You can’t make this shit up.
When they say “parents rights” they mean “paterfamilias” the man of the house having absolute control of the family.
@someguy3 @ilovecomputers The entire modern right can be traced back to a desire for segregated schools. This is the core mission, everything else was a way of shifting a voting block to enable it. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/
If they were complaining about the runaway tuition fees crippling people with student debt, they might have had a point.
I have to be honest this is honestly terrifying rather than being funny. It brings back memory of Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge and that regimes persecution of those perceived to be well-educated, from those who wore glasses to those who spoke foreign languages due them making an association with those things being a part of the Bourgeois.
“76 percent of conservative Republicans parrot whatever they’re told by conservative media.”
There, we just said the same thing.
They do crap like this and then bitch when we say republicans are uneducated. It’s not elitist to want to read a book and learn, assholes.
these people are cancer.
Surprise level holding steady at zero. Education is poison for Republicans.
Really? Why? What is there reasoning?
This is speculation but:
Higher education is typically liberal leaning. Liberals tend to be less religious and far more free thinking.
Conservatives are far more religious and illiterate/less educated. Conservatism as it is now is a minority to progressive ideologies (frequently outvoted in populist polls).
To get more power they need more religious and less educated voters to sway with propaganda/media talking heads. Higher ups are certainly pushing the narrative of private education (run by unlicensed teachers; teaching selective conservative values in textbooks) and it’s parroted by every republican voter and their mothers.
An uneducated voter base will equally vote against their own interest. They just don’t know any better. I’ve seen relatives (grandma with Native American heritage vote republican; anti women’s rights/anti Native American rights/anti social programs) vote to harm themselves because fox told them to. Insanity.
Higher education is not liberal leaving a priori. It’s just that acknowledging reality and facts, and even just some parts of scientific consensus, is completely incompatible with agreeing with anything the GOP does or says.
You’re right. I just tend to see educated folks as liberal in my day to day. That’s my bias.
But if they didn’t vote Republican, how are they going to own the libs. Sure they’re struggling to pay bills and sure they’ll probably just die if they get sick, but what’s more important is that trans people get harassed /s
I suspect fear and uncertainty plays into it a lot too.
The world is changing quite quickly. Boomers got to live through the boom of the 70’s, and younger people keep being told about some fictional utopia of the “good old days.” Whatever they jobs they used to do are either automated or irrelevant now. The white cis male power dominance is eroding, and with it a lot of the social advantages they used to get for free are going away.
So, things are getting worse, and they’re scared and want to do something about it. The problem is, a lot of these people have a zero-sum mentality, where to improve their own standing, they must do so by harming someone else’s standing. The idea that things can be better for everyone with no one losing out just doesn’t exist there.
Obviously that’s not true, but if you try to convince them of that? Well, you’re just trying to trick them so that you can take from them. It’s an us vs. them mentality. And you surely don’t want your kids to join the enemy’s side, so you do your best to make sure they’re raised the “right” way. And if your side wants to harm you? Well, as long as the others are getting hurt more, it’s still a good thing, because now you’re getting ahead of the others.
Boomers got to live through the boom of the 70’s
Might be a typo there. You probably mean the 80s and early 90s. The 70s were pretty grim.
I don’t think “higher education is typically liberal leaning” but rather as you learn more about the world, and how to think critically about it, you realize that most conservative ideals are not in the best interest of most people. They are actually in the interest of those already in power and/or with wealth.
It’s kind of like that saying that nothing removes prejudice faster than travel (or something like that, I’m paraphrasing from memory here).
Also, the whole “liberal indoctrination” of colleges is only a half truth. Do people who go to college come out more liberal? Yes, but not because the colleges are indoctrinating them.
Let’s say you’ve lived in a small town all your life. Everyone you know is pretty much the same. You know very few people who are different so stereotypes abound.
Then you go to college. You start meeting some of the people you had stereotypes of. They don’t match what you thought “those people” would be like. Your stereotypes break down and instead of thinking of them as some scary Other, you see them as actual people.
When you go home, everyone back at home hasn’t met the people you did. They make the bigoted, stereotype filled comments that you once would have echoed. Except, now those comments have faces attached to them for you so you object to them.
To your parents and the people in your small town, you’ve changed. They blame the college for “indoctrinating” you, but in reality it is just that you were exposed to different people and viewpoints.
Higher education is typically liberal leaning.
You can see why they would oppose it then.
Conservatives just like their myths about America, Race, and Gender more than learning the realities as they don’t align with their beliefs.
stupid is as stupid does.
Yes of course they do. I imagine the stats would be similar in most countries. There are two types of conservatives:
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The uneducated/ignorant, they choose conservative ideology because they are confused by different people and are afraid of any change they can see happening.
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Those who have financial incentives. They know that their ideology is wrong and stupid, but they just don’t care. They are only interested in gains for themselves and their family and cronies. Also known as the “fuck you I’ve got mine” types.
Everyone else is just some combination of the two.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that both of those types would be against higher education. The uneducated/stupid are afraid of educated/intelligent people, and are confused when someone they know comes back from college changed from how they were when they left. The ones with a financial incentive are smart enough to know that education generally results in people becoming more left-leaning, and they also know that enough left-leaning people in a population can cause genuine political change – change that might hurt the bottom line of the rich – naturally they want to avoid that.
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To quote Carl Sagan: The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Ah yes, education. The great scourge of mankind.
