C8 wrote:Secondly, a highly educated society produces a population that comes to expect answers from small group of experts. This stifles the ability of people to think for themselves or to conduct their own research. People discount the real world in favor of what they see on the media.
Do you have a reference to someone who has tried to argue this statement, or is something you've just decided is a truism? The highly educated society leads to answers from small groups of experts?
And people are rarely capable of conducting their own research. Confirmation bias is generally the most likely outcome.
C8 wrote:I had a group of students last year an after they returned to school from lockdowns, I asked them what the death rate was for Covid. Students gave me all kinds of answers, but the average range was somewhere between 30 to 60%. I then asked the students if they thought that 30 to 60% of the people in our neighborhood were gone. When they considered it, most of them realized that they were way off. One student actually thought that the death rate was 100% (the whole class laughed!). When i told them that the actual death rate was less than 1/2 of 1% in one year they were astounded.
Sounds like when peak oilers were busy assembling rapture scenarios and I told them they were full of crap. That was after having "researched" the topic.
C8 wrote:Education produces societies were people discount what they actually see in the real world versus what they hear on the news because they are taught that the news and experts reported on the news are the sources of all information in society. Highly educated people lose their own ability to think independently.
Presuming they had it in the first place. There are different types of learning and thinking, sometimes one type of thinking ability just doesn't fit with the problem being addressed.
C8 wrote:I don't think this is the intention of education but I think this is the outcome and I think it is an outcome that must happen all the time in educated societies. Simply sitting in a school and accepting knowledge from an expert conditions people to see the world whatever way experts tell them to see it- even if you teach people to think for themselves they don't b/c of conditioning.
I don't think there is any way around this.
Sure there is. More education, but perhaps not of the kind or within the system you are thinking.
Teaching objectivity is quite difficult, sometimes impossible, and a prerequisite of "educating" on most topics, including doing honest research. I do agree that some of the conditions you describe are hardly condusive to folks thinking for themselves, let alone making them capable of "research".
Plant Thu 27 Jul 2023 "Personally I think the IEA is exactly right when they predict peak oil in the 2020s, especially because it matches my own predictions."
Plant Wed 11 Apr 2007 "I think Deffeyes might have nailed it, and we are just past the overall peak in oil production. (Thanksgiving 2005)"