> Why is half the country without proper education
Some of it is inequality, but some of it is willful diversity. There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance. It is something that bewilders me, and that has only become clear to me in the past 5 years or so. It isn't that some people lack access to education that they want, but rather do not want access to that education because they believe that if you can figure things out without relying on the knowledge humanity has built up over the years. I see it in my own father, who one day told me, "I've been thinking about climate change recently, and I just don't think it's a problem." He didn't research on it, he didn't read on it, he didn't perform experimentations, he just thought about it and came to his ironclad conclusion.
Likewise I see it in plenty of people, even people that are friends that I consider intelligent. They do not understand something, want to understand it, yet will do nothing to actually understand it. I had a friend that didn't understand an aspect of general relativity (he loves physics), which is totally understandable, it is complex stuff. He complained and argued with me about it for years. Finally I literally did a 1 minute search on youtube, found the first video on that specific topic and made him watch it. Then he finally got it.
Ok, I'm on a weird tangent ;) Back to the topic.
These people want to know and yet, for some reason, don't find the motivation to learn using the vast ocean of resources we have now. With the subculture of people in the US that think learning is offensive, an insult to their intellect, an assault on their freedom and independence, you have a problem of a whole other category.
I don't know how prevalent it is in other countries, but I think it occurs in the US because of this new "independent thinker" attitude that is a warped version of the skeptic. They take great pride in believing something other than what they are told.
As a skeptic and someone that likes to work things out for myself and who generally likes to examine the nuance of situations, I find this greatly frustrating.
> Some of it is inequality, but some of it is willful diversity. There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance.
This is, of course, self-fulfilling. In a society where education is poor, people will extrapolate from their own experience to conclude that all education is equally poor.
Source: grew up in the rural South, attending public school, surrounded by people who (correctly) viewed their education as nearly useless.
I think you have the symptoms right but I disagree with your premise:
> These people want to know and yet, for some reason, don't find the motivation to learn using the vast ocean of resources we have now. With the subculture of people in the US that think learning is offensive, an insult to their intellect, an assault on their freedom and independence, you have a problem of a whole other category.
While this may come off as a bit pedantic I think it's important to recognize that no one actually thinks "learning things" is offensive or insulting. While it's convenient to package the behaviors of people you don't understand into a single box I think it spawns an unproductive and even unhealthy attitude towards others.
Rather than packing it all into one root issue, I think it's better to try and match the set of symptoms with a set of (possible) causes. Here is my own personal take on the situation:
|== American Culture Has Failed To Adapt To The Internet's Style Of Trust & Reputation
1. Before television a person's world was often restricted to those in their local community, this meant that reputation was everything and as a consequence, people tended to be naturally very trusting, naive even (since betraying someones trust would hurt your local reputation). If your town's doctor or priest told you something, you would believe them.
2. After television become a household staple in the 50s, this perspective changed a bit. Sure you could always /read/ about people outside of town, or even listen to them on the radio, but with TV they were practically right there in front of you. As a consequence this culture of trusting people within the community naturally extended towards those on TV as well. In fact people started to trust people on TV even more than the people within their local community! If the TV said it it must be true! (it often wasn't but then again, how would they know?)
3. Then the internet happened. It was slow, it took a lot of time to saturate into the lives of most people, but I'd say around 2010, the vast majority of people considered it more reliable than TV. It had now taken the throne of truth from TV and as a consequence: three generations of people who were conditioned to believe EVERYTHING they heard on TV without questioning things suddenly got exposed to a platform that was completely unmoderated and without consensus.
4. It used to be that people would just pick favored news channel and believe everything it told them. They thought that being a "skeptic" was doubting the handful of news channels that other people watched, but obviously /their/ news channel got everything right. These beliefs carried over to the internet, especially in the older generations (but not exclusively by any means). To them the only thing that changed is instead of there being 100 or 1000 channels, there are now infinite. But unfortunately they often fail to realize that their culture of trust is incompatible with a platform where that "local" reputation is near meaningless.
|== The Incompetence Of Mainstream Authorities, After Generations Of Public Trust, Has Lost It's Footing
* It's becoming increasingly obvious how incompetent and outright deceitful some of the most trusted news organizations have become without shame. They have of course almost always been this way but atleast local newspapers at a certain degree of accountability. By over optimizing for the web's engagement driven monetization strategies, news orgs drunk on the trust television provided them, have stopped doing their due diligence and pretty much everyone can see this now thanks to (ironically) the web.
* Coastal Elites over-estimating their intelligence and under-estimating the rest keep getting caught trying to play mind games with the public. This applies to many domains but the best example, while repeated ad nauseam at this point, would be health officials saying masks weren't effective against the virus at first so they could avoid a shortage. This created a very large gaping wound in public trust that will take a very long time to heal. While maybe in the days of television this would have been swept under the rug before long, that's not how things work anymore.
* Recent years have simply had too many cases where the mainstream opinion, paraded as absolute, turned out to be naked from the start. Trump was elected (2016), Brexit happened, and the Corona Virus is not just the flu (the was a conspiracy theory back in January 2020). Honestly even a bunch of little things on the side like CNBC saying the hedgefunds closed their position on those GME shorts have also added to this.
|= People Don't Actually Know How To Do Research
* Regardless of generation or exposure to television, people at large straight up do not even know how to do the most basic of research. A shocking amount of people think typing something into google and looking at the first result is something to be proud of. It's not as you suggest where they are proud not to go any deeper, its that the dunning kruger effect has caused many of the populace to believe that there isn't anything deeper to be looked at.
* People fail to understand the value primary sources. Even most programmers which one might assume trend a bit higher on the bell curve, fail to even look at the original documentation or specification for things that they are trying to learn about. When trying to learn about HTTP for example, rather than just looking at Wikipedia to find the RFC numbers and reading the RFCs themselves. They will instead opt to only look at the summary Wikipedia provides, or worse, rely on a bunch of SEO "optimized" tutorial sites that often get things wrong.
> There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance.
My experience has been with people who don't think that education is bad, but modern universities. I know many people who are smart, self-driven, industrious people who like learning things - who aren't interested in going to a public university. (they're more than happy to avail themselves of YouTube videos, Coursera courses, GitHub projects, work on things with friends, and so on)
Given the state of modern universities, with so many of them pushing the murderous ideology that is neo-Marxism, I can't blame them. A few more generations of this and we'll have our own Cultural Revolution, except with even more than the tens of millions of deaths that China did with theirs.
Some of it is inequality, but some of it is willful diversity. There is a strong undercurrent that education is bad - a counterculture of ignorance. It is something that bewilders me, and that has only become clear to me in the past 5 years or so. It isn't that some people lack access to education that they want, but rather do not want access to that education because they believe that if you can figure things out without relying on the knowledge humanity has built up over the years. I see it in my own father, who one day told me, "I've been thinking about climate change recently, and I just don't think it's a problem." He didn't research on it, he didn't read on it, he didn't perform experimentations, he just thought about it and came to his ironclad conclusion.
Likewise I see it in plenty of people, even people that are friends that I consider intelligent. They do not understand something, want to understand it, yet will do nothing to actually understand it. I had a friend that didn't understand an aspect of general relativity (he loves physics), which is totally understandable, it is complex stuff. He complained and argued with me about it for years. Finally I literally did a 1 minute search on youtube, found the first video on that specific topic and made him watch it. Then he finally got it.
Ok, I'm on a weird tangent ;) Back to the topic.
These people want to know and yet, for some reason, don't find the motivation to learn using the vast ocean of resources we have now. With the subculture of people in the US that think learning is offensive, an insult to their intellect, an assault on their freedom and independence, you have a problem of a whole other category.
I don't know how prevalent it is in other countries, but I think it occurs in the US because of this new "independent thinker" attitude that is a warped version of the skeptic. They take great pride in believing something other than what they are told.
As a skeptic and someone that likes to work things out for myself and who generally likes to examine the nuance of situations, I find this greatly frustrating.