"Educational Density"

I was listening to an interesting discussion on my local NPR station the other day in which the panelists and callers were discussing the various reasons why various groups of people vote the way they do, often in clear opposition to their own interests, and at one point in the discussion, one of the panelists referred to the role of educational density in group voting.

Educational density in this context referred to the percentage in a given city, state, or other voting region of a particular group of citizens who shared a particular level of education - grade school, high school, or college - with the idea being that the relative distribution of education levels can predict how a particular group or region will vote.

As I look at present-day America, I have another possible definition of educational density. In this definition, it refers to the ossification of one's way of thinking as a result of one's level of education ... such as, these damn college-educated elitists don't understand real people, or those high-school yahoos just don't understand how the world really works.

Speaking as one of those damn college-educated elitists, I believe that a lower level of education can lead to insular thinking and a failure to recognize the critical importance of interactions among people, nations and economies. I also believe that a higher level of education can lead to a tendency to ignore the day-to-day concerns of those whose points of view come from the school of hard knocks rather than the ivy-covered walls of academe.

It's important in our current supercharged, politically angry climate to understand the role of educational density not just as a convenient (if dodgy) predictor of voting patterns, but also as a danger to clear thinking. As I've often said here before, Bilbo's First Law applies: don't let anyone else do your thinking for you.

Have a good day. More thoughts coming.

Bilbo