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I feel like your answer is sort of in bad faith. I live in an urban area, and people are quite concerned about the dropout rate (and more to the point that I th

by kaitai 6y ago

I feel like your answer is sort of in bad faith. I live in an urban area, and people are quite concerned about the dropout rate (and more to the point that I think you're trying to imply but are dancing around for your own reasons, the racial achievement gaps). But I guess we put a different spin on it: we are ashamed of it, we should be ashamed of it, and we bring it up a lot in political races and on billboards and in conversations about who to elect to the School Board. Have we been effective in fixing it? Not really. But it's not because of propaganda purposes -- it's because it's a hard problem that's intertwined with questions of financial capital and stability and health care and justice and environment. Anyhow, in the United States, all citizens have the vote, and an uneducated urban vote and an uneducated rural vote are both votes, though due to our unequal representation the rural vote is 'worth' more.

majormajor 6y ago
In sports terms, if a penalty is committed, we give the other team some compensation. Like a pass interference penalty. Because it's not fair to make a team go for the same goal when they've gotten cheated... In the US, we scream bloody murder at most attempts to even out those starting point disparities that our ancestors caused... when I was in school, one favorite trick to do instead was to stick Magnet programs in poor schools to import kids from the rest of the city to try to bring up some of the numbers, rather than focusing on the kids who weren't doing well in the first place. It makes for a wonderful self-fulfilling "these people are worth less because they accomplish less so it's out of our hands so we have no need to try to make right our past wrongs" story.
thu2111 6y ago
Worth noting here something important: when people talk about the "educated" city people, what they actually mean is people holding a university degree. Holding a degree is to a large extent a proxy for age. It used to be that not many people went to university. The concept that ~everyone (or at least 50%) should go to university is a relatively new one. So the numbers of people graduating over time has shot up. Hence if you select the population by whether they have a degree, you'll end up with a lot of young people. And youth is quite correlated with voting left. The notion that holding a degree makes you inherently smarter than someone who doesn't is an increasingly suspicious one to many folks, like me. There are too many people with multiple PhDs writing academic papers that have major errors in them, signing off on papers that have major flaws, changing their supposedly expert opinions overnight for political reasons, saying things on Twitter that are totally bizarre and so on. Do universities really make you "educated" or do they just make you unwilling to question another "educated" person's opinions even when obviously wrong? My experience is that older people, people in more rural areas and those without a degree are more willing to engage in common-sense reasoning and reject nonsensical claims even when they come from an educated member of the elite, whereas degree holders find it far harder (perhaps because it would devalue their own degree).
fastball 6y ago
I think the point GC was making is also that rural people see how poorly democrats are running cities in many cases and don't want that to happen to them. The logic being: better little-to-no government at all than one that does a terrible job.

by kaitai 6y ago

majormajor 6y ago

In sports terms, if a penalty is committed, we give the other team some compensation. Like a pass interference penalty. Because it's not fair to make a team go for the same goal when they've gotten cheated... In the US, we scream bloody murder at most attempts to even out those starting point disparities that our ancestors caused... when I was in school, one favorite trick to do instead was to stick Magnet programs in poor schools to import kids from the rest of the city to try to bring up some of the numbers, rather than focusing on the kids who weren't doing well in the first place. It makes for a wonderful self-fulfilling "these people are worth less because they accomplish less so it's out of our hands so we have no need to try to make right our past wrongs" story.

thu2111 6y ago

Worth noting here something important: when people talk about the "educated" city people, what they actually mean is people holding a university degree. Holding a degree is to a large extent a proxy for age. It used to be that not many people went to university. The concept that ~everyone (or at least 50%) should go to university is a relatively new one. So the numbers of people graduating over time has shot up. Hence if you select the population by whether they have a degree, you'll end up with a lot of young people. And youth is quite correlated with voting left. The notion that holding a degree makes you inherently smarter than someone who doesn't is an increasingly suspicious one to many folks, like me. There are too many people with multiple PhDs writing academic papers that have major errors in them, signing off on papers that have major flaws, changing their supposedly expert opinions overnight for political reasons, saying things on Twitter that are totally bizarre and so on. Do universities really make you "educated" or do they just make you unwilling to question another "educated" person's opinions even when obviously wrong? My experience is that older people, people in more rural areas and those without a degree are more willing to engage in common-sense reasoning and reject nonsensical claims even when they come from an educated member of the elite, whereas degree holders find it far harder (perhaps because it would devalue their own degree).

fastball 6y ago

I think the point GC was making is also that rural people see how poorly democrats are running cities in many cases and don't want that to happen to them. The logic being: better little-to-no government at all than one that does a terrible job.