Confirmed: College Doesn't Make Kids Smarter, Just More Liberal
They don't know much. But they're very certain that they're super-keen and that conservatives are stupid teabaggers so shut up that's why:
While many graduates of American colleges cannot answer basic civics questions, a higher education does make their opinions more liberal on controversial social issues,... The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an independent group with a tradition-minded view of issues... found that people who had attained at least a bachelor's degree were more likely than Americans whose formal education ended with a high-school diploma to take a liberal stance on certain controversial social issues... in general, college does not bring students up to a high level of civics knowledge.
Combine this with overconfidence studies - the ones showing that today's students are more self-confident with less justification than ever before - and you understand why Rock The Vote is the perfect crystallization of young liberal political engagement. You get plucked off the street with - almost by definition - no background in what you'll be voting on. But since you're passionate and involved - motivated - presumably the vague things you really want to be true will magically get transformed into actual facts.
Listen. We've known for decades that you need a certain general awareness of what you're trying to learn - a certain amount of metaknowledge - before you can develop a sense for whether you're learning it. And the only way you get that general sense is by sitting down and just learning stuff. Otherwise you think you're learning when you're actually not, nurturing a growing sense of "illusory superiority" until you end up extolling the brilliance of Andrew Sullivan in the HuffPo comments section.
Backing up: take Rumsfeld's three categories. Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The starting situation when you're learning something new is a bunch of unknown unknowns. You don't know what you're looking for and you won't recognize it if you accidentally see it. Learning is getting to known knowns by passing through known unknowns. The trick is that there's a certain point where you've learned enough stuff that you get a sense for what's out there, what you're trying to learn, what you have to do to learn it, etc. Many of the unknown unknowns become known unknowns.
But until you pass that threshold you're just fumbling around. And if you're brimming with overconfidence - either because of too much self-esteem or because the liberal catechism seems really neat - then we have the joy of contemporary education. Students get convinced they've already got a handle on what's going on. They don't bother learning anything new. Their reading skills are stunted. Misplaced confidence on specifics causes increasingly liberal students to be overconfident in general. And all of it stems from not having learned enough stuff in the first place to develop any amount of metaknowledge.
So take your average 23 year old HuffPo reader. They've been through college so they know they're very smart, because they're liberal and they know being liberal is very smart (more on that in a sec). They log into the site one morning looking for an excuse to support The One and his stimulus disaster. They find an article about something called a "mul-ti-pli-er effect," which seems to be about building bridges, and they summarily conclude that conservatives must be ignorant. Because if conservatives knew about the multiplier effect, how could they oppose the stimulus? QED.
Three things have gone wrong here. The first is that our delightful liberal probably doesn't really understand the multiplier effect. Visualizing things like marginal propensities takes a little bit of mathematical comfort, and so they're probably just thinking that money keeps getting spent or something. This bit me a while back when a graduate student tried to "explain" to me that "newer studies" prove that increasing supply increases price. They read as much on HuffPo! I think they misunderstood an article on branding or non-commodity goods or something - not really sure - but I'm fairly confident it didn't apply to the conversation we were having about parking lots. In any case you can see how things go awry.
First, they're just wrong. More distressingly, they think they're right. They can get that idea from all kinds of places - they're enamored with their sense of pseudo-sophistication, they can't believe they could have a thought that wasn't shiny, pro-Obama is awesome and this is pro-Obama so ergo its awesome. Whatever. The point is that they're convinced that here they've found a nugget of truth, they're confident in advance that any critic just doesn't know about it, and they need look no further. The problem is explicitly one of metaknowledge: they don't realize there's a whole debate about the multiplier effect, and that knowing it might exist is the beginning of the argument. It's not something the other side just missed.
Students are entering universities without knowledge of American history or government. Instead they have a set of incoherent, often contradictory liberal bromides about "corporations" and "environmentalism" and "tolerance" and so on. They got those bromides, by the by, from the previous generation of undereducated and overconfident college students who scurried off, Masters of Ed in hand, to raise an entire generation of schoolkids on "critical reasoning skills" rather than on "actually knowing stuff."
So those schoolkids enter college. Then their banalities get reinforced: positive nods from graduate students and professors, latent self-esteem driven overconfidence in their beliefs, and so on. Why should they bother learning anything new? As near as they can tell, their self-esteem and their teachers have converged on a single point - they're really keen and clever.
Of course they end up worshiping Obama. It seems like exactly the thing to do. Just don't ask them to explain why.
References:
* College Makes Students More Liberal, but Not Smarter About Civics, Study Finds [CHE]
* U.S. Teens Brimming With Self-Esteem [WaPo]
* Overconfidence Among Teenage Students Can Stunt Crucial Reading Skills [Science Daily]
* Dunning-Kruger effect [Wiki]
* No Wonder Students Think It's A Waste Of Time [ACRLog]
* How DUMB Are Obama Voters? [Flopping Aces]
mererhetoric.com
College Makes Students More Liberal, but Not Smarter About Civics, Study Finds
By Jill Laster
While many graduates of American colleges cannot answer basic civics questions, a higher education does make their opinions more liberal on controversial social issues, according to a new report issued on Friday by an academic think tank.
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an independent group with a tradition-minded view of issues, asked about 2,500 randomly selected people more than 100 questions to gauge their civic knowledge, public philosophy, civic behavior, and demographics.
"The Shaping of the American Mind," the fourth report from the institute on civic literacy, will be formally released on Wednesday.
Richard A. Brake, a co-author of the report, said he and his colleagues had sought to see what civic or social lessons students were learning in college.
The institute found that people who had attained at least a bachelor's degree were more likely than Americans whose formal education ended with a high-school diploma to take a liberal stance on certain controversial social issues. For example, 39 percent of people whose highest level of education was a bachelor's degree supported same-sex marriage, compared with 25 percent with a high-school diploma. The trend continued with advanced degrees: About 46 percent of people with master's degrees supported same-sex marriage, as did 43 percent of people with Ph.D.'s.
Previous surveys have found that, in general, college does not bring students up to a high level of civics knowledge. According to the institute's 2008 report, based on a survey of 2,500, people whose highest level of educational attainment was a bachelor's degree correctly answered 57 percent of the questions, on average. That is three percentage points lower than a passing grade, according to the survey's authors.
Even earlier surveys showed that years in college were only slightly correlated to civics expertise. For a 2006 report the institute surveyed 14,000 college freshmen and seniors on basic civics questions. It found seniors answered an average of 53 percent of the questions correctly, just 1.5 percent higher than freshmen. (After the 2006 report was released, some experts questioned the study's methodology and focus on a small range of facts.)
Mr. Brake said results of the studies in the last four years showed that many universities do not place enough emphasis on civics or the basics of American history. He also called for universities to adopt better-balanced curricula.
"College graduates, whether it be current or graduated in the past, seem to have difficulty knowing basic things about our government and our history," Mr. Brake said. "Does college share all the blame? Of course not — this is a systemic problem, from K through 12 and all the way up. But universities train our teachers and train our leaders, so they play a role."
Civics curricula have drawn concern recently from other critics, such as Bob Graham, the former U.S. senator from Florida who is now based at the University of Florida. He suggested, in an interview last summer with The Chronicle, that colleges be measured based on the number of their current students or graduates who participate in community-service or civic organizations.
chronicle.com
How DUMB Are Obama Voters?
Posted by: Mike's America @ 12:39 pm in Barack Obama, Politics, msm | 66 views
Let’s just say if you had to be informed above average to vote Obama would have lost in a landslide!
“Promote then as an object of primary importance, Institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.”
George Washington, Farewell Address, September 19, 1796
Readers may recall the comical man on the street interviews the Howard Stern show did in New York City weeks before the election. Most of the Obama voters thought it was fine with them that Sarah Palin was running as Obama’s vice presidential candidate.
But if you thought that was just a fluke, or not a very scientific sampling of Obama voters, this poll (PDF here) taken by John Zogby and commissioned by filmmaker John Ziegler amplifies the point:
Zogby Poll
512 Obama Voters 11/13/08-11/15/08 MOE +/- 4.4 points
97.1% High School Graduate or higher, 55% College Graduates
Results to 12 simple Multiple Choice Questions
57.4% could NOT correctly say which party controls congress (50/50 shot just by guessing)
[ Thats right, a MAJORITY of Obama voters thought Republicans controlled Congress last year. ]
81.8% could NOT correctly say Joe Biden quit a previous campaign because of plagiarism (25% chance by guessing)
82.6% could NOT correctly say that Barack Obama won his first election by getting opponents kicked off the ballot (25% chance by guessing)
88.4% could NOT correctly say that Obama said his policies would likely bankrupt the coal industry and make energy rates skyrocket (25% chance by guessing)
56.1% could NOT correctly say Obama started his political career at the home of two former members of the Weather Underground (25% chance by guessing).
And yet…..
Only 13.7% failed to identify Sarah Palin as the person on which their party spent $150,000 in clothes
Only 6.2% failed to identify Palin as the one with a pregnant teenage daughter
And 86.9 % thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her “house,” even though that was Tina Fey who said that!!
[ Yes, Obama voters are Stupid! ]
Only 2.4% got at least 11 correct.
Only .5% got all of them correct. (And we “gave” one answer that was technically not Palin, but actually Tina Fey)
What’s worse is that a majority of Obama voters failed to know even the most basic facts like which party controls congress.
Think we’re overstating the case? See the video. It’s priceless entertainment:
More info at How Obama Got Elected.
If there was anything bad or negative, Obama voters immediately assumed it must be associated with Sarah Palin, even though it was not. 57 states??? I’m surprised this bunch knew there were only 50 states! And these folks never even heard of terrorist Bill Ayers!
Those interviewed didn’t know who Barney Frank or Harry Reid are. How can they be expected to hold these Dems accountable for their misdeeds when they only know what they have been told?
Where do these folks get their news? ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, NPR, PBS, Time, Newsweek, New York Times………Talk about media malpractice!
floppingaces.net |
