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Comment by Yhippa | Hacker News Reader

> There are too many profitable incentives to poor education that are conspiring to perpetuate it. An ill-educated populace is easier to manipulate, gravitate towards consumerism, and won't hold their leaders as accountable. Power generally resides with those who benefit from an ill-educated populace, so anything that would actually help educate children and people at large is discouraged.

I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.

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> actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.

I'm reminded of the quote

> “No one involved in an extralegal activity thinks of themselves as nefarious. I'm a businessman, okay?" - Quark, DS9 S6E25

I don't believe anyone nefariously sits there and says "lets make sure people aren't educated" but I genuinely believe there are people who say "I did this thing and people keep voting me in to keep doing that thing or keep paying me to do that thing, so I'm going to continue doing it that way"

You are 100% correct, people mostly follow incentives. The problem is that, for many politicians, "this thing" in "I did this thing and people keep voting me in, so I'm going to continue doing this thing" refers to the starving and/or defunding of education.

I can almost admire how you manage to think that but that is just ignoring reality. Politicians have created entire media giants that are designed to either lie to you and trigger an emotional response within you. Maybe not out of pure maliciousness but they benefit from doing it.

In the US, it's easy to imagine, or just see, politicians actively opposing expansion of the currently-poor education system. Some actively seek to further defund it (see school vouchers).

As for actively misinforming poor people, that is the day job (campaigning) for countless politicians, who usually spend less than half their time drafting or voting on legislation.

Why did all the civics classes go after the Vietnam protests?

> I want to believe this but I can't honestly imagine someone actively thinking about this and dedicating part of their work to misinforming the poor intentionally.

Populism is exactly this - misinforming poorly educated people with bad scary words, "others", "easy" fixes.

> Inflation is bad! Crime is bad! We'll just deport 20 million "others" and everything will be allright!

Or:

> Let's send all the money we're spending on the EU on the NHS, 350 million pounds per week more for the National Health Service!

In some countries, like the US, there are active efforts to sabotage education, or at least cripple it - by reducing funding to a point where educators have to spend their own money for supplies, get burned out, have poverty-level wages, etc. Those can't be accidental.

That's because you aren't viewing it in the proper context and think that the result of the action is isolated. I can't honestly imagine that you couldn't come up with a single incentive for misinforming people on topics in such a way that would result in your own benefit.

Just curious, how would you describe the motivations of a stereotypical sleazy car salesman offering predatory loan rates: A hard working person doing what they need to do to survive, or a con artist trying to find more victims? Only one of those choices represents reality, and you should really be wary of anyone who would suggest the other choice.

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