One or two centuries ago, progressive people were hoping that, eventually, everyone would be able to receive a decent education.1 It certainly appeared logical to them that if everyone was provided with the intellectual tools to understand and act rationally in the world, then this could only lead to knowledge progress and to more peaceful relations between humans.
Many countries have now reached a fairly good level of education for most of their population, with progress continuing to be made across the world. This definitely contributed to speeding up science and technological progress, but did it contribute to more peace? It’s not really clear, is it? One could argue that the world is in fact more peaceful, because people give more value to human life than in the past. But the generally higher level of education did not contribute to making people more rational, to making bigotry disappear, to helping people to find peaceful solutions. Well it probably helped, but not as much as one could have expected. In fact, we observe some quite surprising effects where some people reject what appears to be the most rational and objective answers. People may even invent convoluted theories in order to reject the scientific consensus; they would even convince themselves, and try to convince others, that their theory is the smart answer, that the mainstream consensus is a manipulation believed only by idiots. Their education basically helps them decrease the level of objective and rational knowledge in themselves and in the world.
Of course there’s a lot to say about what we call “education”: scholarly achievements don’t necessarily create enlightened minds, and education is often still misconstrued as training young minds to “think the right way”, a leftover of an old-fashioned and rigid view of school. But it’s also that people’s beliefs, which are inherited from their family and social environment, are naturally stronger than anything they might learn as part of their formal education. And this is actually logical: you get your knowledge from the sources you trust the most, and obviously most people trust their parents more than their teachers. But what are the chances that your parents and childhood environment give you the “right” knowledge? Technically from your point of view your parents are random strangers,2 so it’s unavoidable that some people will grow up in an environment which is not ideal knowledge-wise… Although even that is debatable: after all, who are we to decide what is a good or bad environment? As I said, aren’t we all the product of a random combination of circumstances? And therefore our knowledge and judgement of others’ knowledge is equally questionable.
It is reassuring to pretend that we know stuff, to pretend that we sit at the top of a pretty solid tower of knowledge, patiently built by humankind along the centuries. We feel that we own this massive amount of knowledge; even the stuff that most of us don’t actually understand, for instance the general theory of relativity, it feels familiar enough to consider it a part of our knowledge. Strictly speaking, there are actually very few things that an individual really knows by themselves; most of the stuff we know, we know it from other people that we trust: the news we read or watch, the academic knowledge we acquired, the life skills we got from our family and friends… If one starts questioning all of this borrowed knowledge there would be very little left. Who actually knows by experience that the Earth is round? Very few people, the rest of us just accept the general consensus because we generally trust science, teachers, parents, etc. This means that human knowledge heavily relies on some very strong trust fabric between humans: any piece of knowledge is actually experienced by very few people, such as the ones who discover it; the vast majority of us just believes, we have faith.
It is amazing how much humankind achieved by trusting each other’s knowledge. There is nothing wrong with that, it is actually evidence to the trusting nature of humans. But it’s worth keeping in mind that we don’t know much, since practically all the stuff we know is actually stuff we believe. This calls for humility and for healthy questioning. Conspirationist people are right to question what we are told by experts, politicians or serious people in general; but they are wrong to assume that these people always lie too; questioning is accepting not to know for sure, it’s not replacing a belief with another one that we believe even harder. We are always tempted to forcefully convince ourselves of our own knowledge in order to appear smart, confident, strong, stable. This is actually self-harm, the same kind of violence as the one used to force somebody to believe something.3 It’s similar to using the argument of authority in the wrong sense, that is just accepting some information as reliable because its source is supposedly knowledgeable: I’m smart so I know that what I believe is correct. It’s not only a mistake, it’s violent: it’s the equivalent of inflicting yourself an injury just to prove to yourself that you’re strong.
This is obviously unhealthy. In fact this is where one needs a bit of humility, because it’s not so easy to accept oneself as not-knowing, with all the associated negative thoughts of being stupid, weak, vulnerable. Once we get past this, we can accept our nature of ever-learning being, like a child who sees the world with curiosity and is not afraid at all to make mistakes or to look like an idiot. Naivete is a refreshing experience, it opens our mind to being impressed by the world. We don’t know much, we’re even not really sure of what we know… hence we can discover.
-
Conservatives were trying to prevent this to happen, of course. They thought that making people smarter was a dangerous and subversive idea, and that it was important to maintain education as a privilege of the “elite”. ↩︎
-
This might feel counter-intuitive because most people see their parents as the most non-random thing in the world. Yet we can’t choose our parents, i.e. select the most knowledgeable ones and those who are the most likely to provide us with a healthy nurturing upbringing, can we? So from the point of view of a child being born, it’s a matter of chance who their parents happen to be. ↩︎
-
Sometimes called brainwashing. ↩︎