As indicated by our last post, one focus at the moment is on the education system. But we are always interested in education in a broader sense, in terms of an intelligent and informed citizenry. We were raised by parents who not only were college-educated but in teaching professions, one a speech pathologist in public schools and the other a professor in state colleges. From a young age, we had instilled in us curiosity, critical thinking, and a love of learning. And that has been reinforced by spending most of our life in a liberal college town.

Nonetheless, we are college dropouts and, because of a learning disability, never did well with conventional pedagogy. Most of our own learning has been informal self-education, as we’ve been highly motivated to do so, quite obsessive at times. By way of parents and cultural osmosis, we’ve picked up a lot about how to learn and how to think, more important than merely memorizing factoids. And besides, memory recall was always our weak point, causing us to compensate with other intellectual skills. Anyway, memory recall has become less relevant now that anyone can look up detailed info in an instant.

The point is that, all in all, we lack much in the way of the kind of formal knowledge that would be emphasized in the mainstream education system. For example, our math skills are pathetic and we have little technical grasp of statistics, which sadly just makes us normal Americans. Yet through intense self-study, we’ve picked up a strong grasp of reading comprehension, media literacy, and critical thinking. This has given us an intuitive sense of what is likely true or false. That is to say our bull shit detector is finely tuned. Also, we are able to pick up quickly on lingo and ideas, so as to be able to follow scholarly debates.

These are rare abilities, so it seems, or else the average person is intellectually lazy to an extreme degree, but even such intellectual laziness would often be learned from and modeled in the failed education system. We were reminded of this in having various discussions this week. In one particular Reddit discussion, the topic was United States data on drug overdose deaths, as mapped out with statewide data. West Virginia had by and far the worst rate, whereas South Dakota had the best. We made a comment about natural resource states usually measuring well on indicators of social health, largely because they tend to have stable and prosperous economies with low poverty and inequality. This is something we know from our past research, as we live in a natural resource state.

We’ve looked a lot at this kind of data, and our pattern recognition abilities have allowed us to correlate data in meaningful ways, giving us a general sense of what to expect. So, even when confronted by new data, we already have a framework for understanding what it might mean, what are the larger contexts (social, economic, historical, etc), and what are the likely causal and contributing factors. We have this basic familiarity that allows us to quickly ascertain the relevance and veracity of something, but combined with a curiosity to simply look something up to find out what is true.

Someone responded about this view not squaring with the supposed fact, as they suggested, that West Virginia is also a natural resource state, in its historical coal mining. Without having any specific knowledge about the coal industry, we instantly suspected this was a wrong assessment. We have enough breadth of knowledge to realize the larger conditions that have developed over generations. Coal mining in general has been in decline for a long time and what’s left of it employs few people, all of which we consider common knowledge. Why wasn’t this obvious to this other commenter? We can only presume they were responding to a media image, as portrayed in movies and shows, of West Virginia as a coal mining state.

Based on various readings we’ve done over the decades, we felt fairly confident that the coal industry, at this point, most probably represents a small part of the West Virginia economy. Call it an informed guesstimation. Then after doing a quick search, requiring about 30 seconds of effort, our assessment was confirmed. The top result in a web search showed that coal represents 4.8% of state earnings and 2.5% of employment. Because of decades of reading broadly on thousands of topics, we have a lot of background knowledge. For example, we once did a deep survey of Appalachian economics and social problems, as part of an exploration in determining if white poverty really is any different from black poverty (it’s not).

Here is another example from the same discussion. Someone else brought up Native American reservations in South Dakota. They argued such places would have higher drug overdose death rates. There is little doubt about that, whether or not it’s all that much higher. But how is that significant and relevant? There would be specific areas of concentrated drug-related deaths in nearly every state. Why pick on impoverished minorities? It’s not clear that this was dog whistle politics, though it had that feeling about it. Once again, a purely intuitive sense told us that reservations, in being relatively smaller populations, are unlikely to have much impact on statewide data. Indeed, Native Americans, both on and off reservations, are only 8.57% of South Dakota residents.

A similar kind of thing comes up with the right-wing moral panic, scapegoating, and explicit dog whistles of using ‘Chicago’ as a proxy for ‘blacks’. Every time there is some shooting incident or a brief uptick of deaths in Chicago, all of the right-wing media obsesses over it, often along with much of supposed ‘liberal’ corporate media. Yet, as we know, Chicago’s rate of violent crime tends to hew closely to the national average of big cities. It occasionally goes up a bit, but at other times it goes down. Besides, we also know that rural areas actually have higher per capita violent crime rates. It’s a basic level of statistical analysis to comprehend that larger populations, even with lower per capita rates, will have higher overall numbers.

But this most basic level of intellectuality evades even many highly educated people. For the most part, we are statistically ignorant and yet we understand some basic statistical concepts. So, we have enough media literacy to know when to realize data is being spun as a narrative, is being used to deceive and mislead. Most Americans apparently, in lacking intellectual and ideological self-defense, are vulnerable to such propaganda campaigns. The corporate media repeats the name ‘Chicago’ so much that it takes on an importance in political and public imagination far beyond it’s importance as seen in actual data. But why are most people so incurious as to research the data for themselves?

Most of this kind of analysis seems like common sense and it’s relatively easy to do, but it can help to have a diverse familiarity with all kinds of background knowledge, to realize something is off and what it might be, in order to know what to interrogate. It’s interesting that so many people are inadequate in what used to be idealized as a liberal arts education, in knowing a little bit about a lot of things. As an autodidactic dilettante, we’ve probably ended up with more of a liberal arts education than most people with a college education, as colleges these days are mostly designed to spit out professional workers with a narrow range of abilities, not informed and critical thinking citizens and leaders.

The problem here isn’t only about the formal education system, not even whether it’s well funded or not. We know some older people lacking in such critical thinking skills who attended college in the post-war period during the height of public education funding, when higher education was practically free to the public and sometimes was entirely free to state residents. Those same people will complain about the decline of education while not seeing the deficiencies in their own education. There is a certain set of skills that aren’t being taught to most U.S. citizens, at any level of education, and it’s far from a new problem. Few of us are learning how to learn, much less how to think for ourselves.

Here is the deeper problem. One suspects that most Americans don’t realize how uneducated and miseducated they are, similar to how they don’t likely grasp their state of historical amnesia. Even ignoring the disinfo and spin, the average person surely doesn’t like to think of themselves as one of the ill-educated victims of the education system. It’s only those other inferior people who are gullible ignoramuses. For whatever reason, we’ve always been more open to acknowledging and admitting our own ignorance, as we see it as the starting point of knowledge. It’s not a point of shame, just a reminder of how much there is to learn.

Yet in our experience, the more educated someone is the less likely they are to admit to the deficiencies in their education (i.e., smart idiot effect). That is understandable, after having invested so much time and money into their own higher education, which in our society confers respectability and status, an outward achievement that is meant to prove that one is above average or somehow basically worthy. After all, what is being described above is a rather demoralizing conclusion about the state of American education. But without talking about it, specifically in how it affects us personally, how are we to seek education reform? And in the meantime, if we don’t know what we lack, how are we to seek improvement through self-education?