The great divide: the ones who think America is Great, and the ones who merely think that their own tertiary education group is Great.
and the ones who merely think that their
own tertiary education group is Great.
There are plenty of folks with postsecondary education who think highly of America, and I'm one of them. It is highly flawed, and also a pretty good place. We get a lot of things right.
Let me be crystal clear: what I'm opposed to is simplistic, jingoistic, one-sided "America is the greatest thing ever" fantasies of American exceptionalism. This is how my primary and secondary education, in a fairly decent public school district in the 80s and 90s, generally described America.
And that's mild, as far as "American exceptionalism" goes. My dad's wife is a member of a radical Christian sect. On a regular basis, she mails me glossy pamphlets and brochures describing how America's greatness is literally foretold in the Bible. There are significant numbers of Americans who believe this wholeheartedly.
There is a clear divide between such delusional fantasies, and a more nuanced view of America. But that doesn't mean all of us on the rational side of the divide think it's an awful place or something like that.
As for me, I don't even have a postsecondary degree. Just some postsecondary education. Not exactly ivory tower stuff. But some of it was eye opening. Ideally our public primary/secondary schools would just teach America's flaws as well as its strengths.
I personally expect people with post-secondary education to be more ideological than people without one. After all, they’ve been in some kind of educational institution for longer...
It is quite common for people with a post-secondary
education to think that they have fundamentally better
critical-thinking skills and are much less prone to
propaganda, just because they have sat in lecture halls
for 4–9 years
There's no way to be clear enough against somebody with a bad-faith agenda.
It's pretty clear you want folks with postsecondary education to disdain those without it.
Perhaps you had a bad experience with education, perhaps it simply feels good to you to tee off on perceived elitism -- whether it actually exists or not. You wouldn't be the first. Some people just get off on that underdog angle.
I regret to inform you that I do not think that postsecondary education automatically makes anybody better than anybody else at any particular thing, and few do, and I've not said such a thing ever. Do I think there's a positive correlation between like, education and critical thinking skills? Yeah, sure. I'd also agree that universities turn out plenty of idiots, and of course some education sucks and can be worse than none at all, and that at best formal education is just one component of being a well-rounded person. All hail the autodidact.