I guess my lack of education hasn’t hurt me none…
– Kodachrome, by Paul Simon
A couple of weeks ago, in my column about the stock market reaction to President Trump’s tariffs, I made a reference to how his policy was similar to that of George Washington.
Trump, like George Washington, understands that if you don’t want to pay tariff-inflated prices… Buy American!
A reader took extreme exception to my even mentioning Trump and Washington in the same sentence, referring to me as “typical uneducated MAGA”. As is my practice, I didn’t respond — at least not directly, preferring to do so here.
My first impression of being called “uneducated” was to assume that reader didn’t see the biography that editor Bill Hudson includes with my columns. But on further consideration, it probably wouldn’t matter, because I doubt the reader considers my mere academic credentials reflective of her idea of an “education”.
Here’s how Webster’s Dictionary defines “education”:
1. a: the action or process of educating or of being educated, also : a stage of such a process
1. b: the knowledge and development resulting from the process of being educated; a person of little education
2: the field of study that deals mainly with methods of teaching and learning in schools
The Cambridge Dictionary definition is similar:
the process of teaching or learning, especially in a school or college, or the knowledge that you get from this
The problem with the obvious theme of both is the presumption that you can only get educated in schools. Yet neither of the George Washington quotes in my column were taught to me in school. I found them through my own research.
School taught me to read. That’s an acquired skill. Curiosity can’t be taught. At best it can be encouraged and given structure through education. But even those refinements can be self-taught, if you know how to read. (An “autodidact” is a person who is self-educated. I learned that word from my own reading.)
That appears to be the difference between the education I received, and what passes for it now. In addition to being taught how to read, I learned how to think.
Public primary and secondary schools today teach what to think — but, as test scores reveal, not how to read.
Being told what to think continues for those with the minimal reading skills necessary to get into colleges using lowered admission standards.
Based on my own law school teaching experience, the stinted thinking among a significant segment of even the top graduates of colleges is mind-boggling. But they can regale you with seemingly endless slogans about ill-conceived concepts of “social justice”.
The principle failure of our current education system over the past several decades has been indoctrination for education. As one educator who recognizes the problem wrote, “If our goal truly is education, not indoctrination, then we must ask ourselves: how can we understand someone’s position if we are unwilling to listen to them? We can’t. However, listening to and platforming has become conflated with agreeing with someone. Again, we face a binary choice instead of a nuanced understanding.”
Is it the result of that educational failure which makes my linking of George Washington (through his own words) to Donald Trump considered “uneducated” by my disgruntled reader? Because I don’t subscribe to the ‘Orange Man Bad’ ethos, it’s obvious I haven’t been sufficiently indoctrinated — ergo, I’m “uneducated”.
It’s that same mis-perception which declares Trump voters “lack cognitive sophistication”.
https://www.salon.com/2022/03/23/new-research-on-voters-theyre-not-the-sharpest-tools-in-the-box
Like Trump, during George Washington’s second term (1793-7) he was subjected to constant personal attacks by his political enemies (lead by Thomas Jefferson) who were working “anonymously” through the media of the time – partisan newspapers (the National Gazette, and the Aurora) that kept up attacks on Washington’s policies and character.
That was the beginning of partisan party politics in the United States. Jefferson, the leader of the emergent ‘Democratic-Republican Party’ defeated the incumbent John Adams (a ‘Federalist’) in 1800 in an election that would rival any of our recent ones for personal acrimony.
Shortly before his death (1799) George Washington lamented the emergence of political parties — the result of which, he warned, would result in people voting based on “party” rather than fitness for office.
“Let that party set up a broomstick and call it a true son of liberty, a Democrat, or give it any other epithet that will suit their purpose and it will command their votes in toto!”
To further display my lack of “cognitive sophistication”, I’ll return to the subject that elicited my reader’s ire. Here is another thought from Washington on tariffs , “Nations will be disposed to give us equal advantages in commerce from dread of retaliation”.
Damn… that sounds familiar…