Does Education Make Us Liberal?

It's widely known that better-educated people tend to be more liberal—or "progressive," as we might prefer to say since certain segments have done their best to make liberal a dirty word.

And studies have shown this, studies that have broken down voting patterns in the electorate by groups according to years of education.

(Big and important parenthesis: Of course not all college graduates, or even advanced-degree holders, are automatically liberal. It seems to me that people with certain degrees are less likely to be liberal. For example, people with MBAs are, not surprisingly, quite pro-business and often conservative according to other parameters as well. Maybe engineers are not the most liberal sorts, either.)

But the liberally-educated are liberal. (Is it a coincidence that the word liberal has these two uses?) For a long time I've contemplated why this should be so. I think important components of that education which produces liberals are literature, anthropology, psychology, and logic.

Literature and the other arts, I think, are the cornerstone of all this. I think that people who have been made acquainted with literature have undergone several processes: They have had their minds opened to a wider variety of experience and thus perhaps been made to have a more relativistic and less absolutistic viewpoint. (Studying anthropology should do this, too.) They have been exposed to writers' wisdom as to much of life and human experience, such that the reader can be sitting and reading in the most isolated and even (dare I say?) backward time or place and even so, through reading, travel the world and gain experience and wisdom and knowledge of other places and times.

Many writers, filmmakers, and artists of every sort are forward thinkers. Thus the audience whom these artists reach becomes exposed to less conventional viewpoints and perhaps encouraged to question a lot of received ideas and "truths." Remember, if it hadn't been for the value of education and the disseminating of the ideas of the forward thinkers, the radicals, many of us would probably still believe that the Earth is flat.

Psychology, too, teaches us valuable things. The people who have taken even Psych 101 and have learned about human perception would never pay much heed to the idea of seeing Jesus' or the Virgin Mary's face on a tortilla.

Studying logic might make us more immune to being swayed by, say, political advertising that slams an individual, rather than keeping to the issues. (In logic this is known as the argumentum ad hominen, attack on the person.) Nor as easily swayed by a lot of people who use whatever platform they've got to stir people up by means of rhetoric which, when examined, proves not logically sound. There are a lot of demagogues and such who simply use propaganda that will work on the less wary and will be seen through by those who know more about argumentation. Propaganda was used so well by Göbbels in Nazi Germany but propaganda was not new then and it has not disappeared since.

It might be another subject, how powerful interests manage to recruit masses of people to the views they want them to have, and I have touched on this in other postings.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein