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Comment by SuoDuanDao | Hacker News Reader

Looking at prior examples, state-subsidized education seems to become indoctrination at the worst possible time. The value of education being determined by employers may be suboptimal, but it's at least decentralised enough to resist mass dishonesty or tyranny. If you have an idea to replace the current system I'd want to know how it doesn't lose that feature before I listened further.

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Many European countries pay for their citizens’ university education, and from experience I can confirm that there is none of the sort of indoctrination that you are concerned about.

If anything I’d say more college-educated citizens is a shield against tyranny, as it trains you to be more intellectually critical, and therefore (one would hope)c , inoculated somewhat against anti-factual biases.

In Europe far fewer people go to college vs the US (apart from Norway, UK, NL). Moreover, they have significantly more rigorous secondary educations, especially on the technical track.

I wasn't familiar with the stats here, and this seems to be true (though I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say "far fewer"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tertiary_...

Though note that the gap closes when you compare "equivalent to a 4-year degree or higher" rather than "equivalent to a 2-year degree or higher". Seems that 2/3 year degrees are much more common in the US for some reason. Wonder if that's 3-year bachelor's degrees vs. the more common 4-year in many European institutions.

E.g. US/UK/DE/FR, pct completed for 25-34 yr olds:

2 year: 47/49/30/45 4-year: 36/42/28/28

I'd be interested in further reading/analysis as this is a pretty rough eyeball of the tabular data on my part, and I'm not claiming to have understood this fully.

If you don't think indoctrination at universities is a serious issue, you clearly haven't seen the inside of a college classroom for quite some time.

Do you have any examples? My university education, at a state university, was paid for by my state government. I have no idea what 'indoctrination' you're talking about. The only requirements that the state government gave my university were the requirements under their land-grant status.

Colleges in the US are very skewed ideologically, towards the far left. This has been a very clear and consistent pattern building up over a few decades, but it has become obvious only in the last 5-10 years, where that bias has been exercised much more openly to promote one worldview and suppress all others. I recommend following The College Fix (http://www.thecollegefix.com/) or FIRE (https://www.thefire.org/) to keep up with stories on this topic. There are also other publications like the Chronicle (https://www.chronicle.com/) or Inside Higher-ed (https://www.insidehighered.com/) that feature some of this content.

Here are several examples of political bias/indoctrination/monocultures on college campuses:

- College faculty have overwhelmingly singular political preferences, based on their donations: https://www.thecollegefix.com/92-percent-of-college-faculty-...

- Professor who exposes lack of academic rigor in grievance studies is investigated by his university (Portland State) on "ethics" grounds: https://quillette.com/2019/07/29/when-ethics-review-becomes-...

- College students oppose free speech/thought/inquiry on campuses per polls: https://www.thecollegefix.com/shock-poll-most-students-oppos...

- University debate society bans Richard Dawkins from speaking to prioritize the "comfort" of their students: http://www.universitytimes.ie/2020/09/the-hist-will-not-be-m...

- University uses COVID as an excuse to ban some gatherings but not others based on ideology: https://www.scribd.com/document/477474467/Southeastern-Legal...

- University punishes student for his Instagram posts: https://reason.com/2020/07/24/fordham-university-disciplines...

- Professor threatens to fail students who write about Trump in a positive light: https://www.yaf.org/news/illinois-professor-threatens-to-fai...

- Professor bans student from class because he challenged the professor's views on gender: https://www.foxnews.com/us/college-student-kicked-out-of-cla...

- College tries to censor coursework that paints negative views of Islam: https://www.thefire.org/federal-court-rejects-unsound-lawsui...

I could keep going but this is what I was able to find quickly through search. The reality is that there is no room for views that go against the prevailing culture on most campuses today. Those who share the prevailing views are now in the camp of using the power of their supermajority to suppress/censor/punish/ban anyone who disagrees with them. Honest debate and truth seeking cannot take place in such an environment - and if that is true, then it follows that university environments tell people WHAT to think, not HOW to think, and that constitutes indoctrination.

The question posed is not whether the political viewpoint of academicians lean in a particular direction. The question is regards to whether government-funded schools enact the biases of the government.

You evidence demonstrates that is not the case -- many of those left-leaning professors are employed by institutions funded by the governments of red states.

I misunderstood. Federal and state funding do make up a significant portion of public university budgets, but post-recession, federal funding makes up a greater share than state funding (https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...). Regardless, I don't feel universities enact the biases of governments, either at the state or federal level. I think there is a general bias in the academic community that crosses those lines.

I think that bias (perceived or real) is more of a factor of US higher-education tradition of than anything else. If you get a liberal arts degree, you'll take courses focused in nuanced discussions of arts, humanities, sociology, etc... and those courses are going to be taught by people who inherently thought those topics were important enough to dedicate their lives to.

Of course, it's completely reasonable for a sociology professor to think that social issues are important, just as much as we might expect a business or economics professor to believe that business or economics is important. And the things that people think are important influences a person's politics.

If you look at the academic disciplines that are interest groups that conservative politics align with, you'll find conservatives there: petroleum engineering, business, marketing, religious studies, etc. The thing is, there's just not that many academic focus areas that contemporary conservative politics prioritizes in their messaging.

In the end, I don't think the bias of individual professors at a university is a concern as much as institutional bias is. You can never really hire a professor who doesn't have an inherent interest in their own work. The important part is that we continue the western tradition of well-rounded study so that people are exposed to as many differing viewpoints as possible.

Your point about biases aligning with the field is interesting. I think it depends on how "generalized" a field is. "Economics" for example, allows exploration of both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist perspectives. However, social science has been subdivided into many narrow fields like "gender studies", which include presupposed assumptions. If instead these same subjects fell under a single broader field called "social science", then there is room for academic exploration both in favor of and against such assumptions.

We probably both agree that individual bias cannot realistically be eliminated. However, I feel that despite biases, individuals shouldn't practice disingenuous academic behavior. As a quick example of this, I'll offer that sociologists regularly claim there is a significant gender pay gap without performing a multivariate study that controls for various confounding factors. If they exercised more rigor and held a sincere mentality of truth seeking, they would explore those obvious contradictions to their assumptions more readily, and also welcome the same explorations from their students and peers.

I think intolerance for different opinions is broader than just professors though. It's also campus administrators (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/opinion/liberal-college-a...) and the students themselves (https://www.thecollegefix.com/shock-poll-most-students-oppos...). If this intolerance persists or worsens, the outcome will be that anyone who disagrees must self-censor and express blind faith to avoid negative consequences. That's not academic freedom, but rather religious coercion.

It has been nearly a decade for me, but I went to a large state school for undergraduate and an even larger state school for graduate. I too have no idea what you're talking about.

Rather than replying to my personal anecdote with a hostile "you don't know what you're talking about", I'm sure you'd find yourself with fewer downvotes if you instead provided your own personal anecdote, or some objective information supporting your argument.

I thought that this statement was sufficiently self-evident as to not require examples, anecdotal or otherwise. The comments and downvotes would suggest otherwise, so here goes a basic one.

Look at the voting registration or political donations among academics in the United States. They are skewed almost exclusively toward one party, despite the fact that the country itself is quite divided. Even arguing that it's common for a field to self-select and skew this way or that, there is an extreme political monoculture among the instructors at most U.S. universities.

Now, can one _prove_ that this leads to an insular intellectual culture there that presents one side of an issue? Probably not, that's a hard thing to prove because persuasion and beliefs are a very complex and multi-faceted topic. However, common sense would dictate that yes, when all of your instructions are aligned more or less with one part of the political spectrum the end result is a lopsided presentation of things that has the effect of indoctrinating students to the dominant political view of the instructors, even if that was never the explicit intent.

One example from my own experience. I had a public health professor who did a multi-part lecture on the evil of the U.S. embargo on Cuba. This took place over several classes resulting in about four hours of total lecture time, and included a fair amount of history. At no point during any lecture did she mention the Cuban missile crisis, i.e. the Cuban government allowing the Soviet Union to place nuclear weapons 90 miles off of the American coast, putting a large portion of the population at risk of nuclear destruction. Now I don't think this necessarily justifies the embargo, but to spend four days of class discussing the embargo on Cuban without a single mention the Cuban missile crisis is intellectually irresponsible at best, and a example of someone's personal bias worming its way into the instruction.

Please, examples.

How does Hungary defunding gender studies fit into that worldview?

how does it not fit into that worldview?

"There is none of the indoctrination you speak of"

Defunding an area of study because the ruling party doesn't like it sure looks like state propaganda to me. Funding coming from the government makes that easier.

So, a semi-fascist government trying to undermine education is an argument against publicly available education?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/03/world/europe/soros-hungar...

They already got rid of the non-government funded ones, that didn't seem to be any more difficult that going after the government funded ones...

To maybe add some more particulars to this, in most Western countries governmental authority is legitimized via public opinion. We all have heard that "a well educated citizenry is critical to democracy" but one ought to also consider that one's education will impact one's opinions. So state funded education could theoretically manipulate mass opinion in favor of government backed positions over time (maybe by framing historical events in a particular way for example).

Manipulating public opinion may seem petty or roundabout for a government but having legitimized policy creates a lot of stability for decision makers so it seems worthwhile. The gambit even pays off when the majority of the public isn't persuaded by education too, since the people who agree with you are by definition the "well educated" you can give their opinion more weight without seeming like a tyrant.

That's the idea being alluded to by the parent here at least I think.

Yes, and it's an idea that has no basis on the actual, not theoretical, experience of most of us here.

My experience has been that I never learned much negative about my city/state/country in grade/high school. I had to learn all those things elsewhere.

Yeah I suppose to detect a situation like this you'd need to do some sort of meta analysis on changes in how historical narratives are framed versus government policy. Like, maybe some country goes from ally to non ally and then historical narratives around that country shift to a slightly more negative tone. I dunno.

My opinion was more shaped by accounts of education when state power waned - By the accounts I've heard Rome, the USSR, the Ottomans etc all tried to retain power by tightening control over institutions of education. It's a natural lever to grab for when things get worse, and it's also when these institutions most need to be independent.

All institutions, public, private, and communities, have a narrative that favors them. That's not particular to universities.

However out of all the institutions I have personally and anecdotally interacted with, universities have by the far the most openness to dissenting ideas, by a very substantial margin.

A lot of people revel at the amount of internal gossip and conflict within universities, but the fact that it exists, rather than there being people kicked out without question, is a testament to its flexibility.

> Looking at prior examples, state-subsidized education seems to become indoctrination at the worst possible time.

3/4 of the university students in the US are currently enrolled in a state-subsidized public institution. This has been the status-quo for many decades.

To the contrary, US state universities are known for their solid educational foundations and research output -- and the reputation of various private-universities in the US is rather spotty.

The reputation of private schools is “spotty” in the sense of being a much broader distribution, IMO.

The very top schools and the very worst schools tend to be private, with the latter being the (near-?)scam, for-profit schools.

As a european that statement just seems disconnected from reality.

I understand that it is how many americans view the world, but claiming that the society that I live in can't possible exist is... disheartening.

Even to many Americans.

college education is free in Germany. They also are known for their engineering prowess...

Is it true that Germany “tracks” students early and aggressively? I.e. if you’re not doing well academically, then you are encouraged to use the vocational track.

Not that there’s anything wrong with vocational training compared to a university. The plumber who came out for a 15 minute house call probably makes more than I do in a year.

> Not that there’s anything wrong with vocational training compared to a university.

The quality of work put out by German tradesmen is also world-class: I think the system deserves praise. Small manufacturing businesses are the backbone of German exports.

That’s a lot of corporatocracy kool aid you’re drinking.

Corporations (who pay lower taxes than citizens) in charge of education is a specific form of dystopian hell.

I did say it was suboptimal. The fact that you chose to insult rather than put forward solutions tells me you either don't understand the strengths of such a system or know your own solution would fall short.

Education determined by private employers will have less groupthink than education determined by a democratically elected group of legislators?

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