Degrees don't make one more intelligent

My earliest memories are of living in a trailer park in Plymouth, Ind., in 1953. The following year my parents moved to a rented house until, a few years later, they were able to buy one. But my trailer-trash roots are firm.\nNeither of my parents went to college. Both from large families impoverished by the Great Depression, they could only try to realize their dreams of higher education through their children. Education was important to my parents, and they encouraged my interest in reading while tolerating my lack of interest in sports. My mother especially always told me I'd be around nicer people if I went to college.\nMy father was a construction foreman and later worked in his brother's scrap metal business. My mother was a housewife, later a factory worker. I've begun but never completed a college degree; I'm a janitor and dishwasher, which keeps me working-class, but you know, my mom was right: I do meet nice people around a university food service, including my co-workers. My life's not quite what my parents had in mind, but that's how it goes.\nI'm not pretending to be a typical working-class person, whatever that might be. I believe I'm more typical of the person who's the first in his or her family to go to college. One common trait of such people is our alienation both from our working-class background and from the middle-class or professional academic environment into which we've moved. Alienation of that kind is a good thing.\nI'd never heard of NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt before he died at Daytona earlier this year; I don't pay attention to auto racing, or any other sport. I did start paying attention rather quickly to some reactions I saw to the outpouring of grief and media attention his death inspired. On a local Usenet newsgroup, for example, the response of several members of the IU community to Earnhardt's death was to jeer that it was of interest only to inbred Kentuckians who show butt crack. "Trailer parks around the nation have lowered their flags to half staff, that's certain," wrote one. "Wow, Nascar fans can read?" queried another.\nObviously some of this stuff was meant as humor, which shows how much higher education enhances wit. But it was expressive of an attitude that I've seen all too often: that working people without university education are an inferior breed, fit only to marry their first cousins and appear on tabloid TV shows. "Low-class" is very commonly used to derogate behavior or opinions that someone dislikes, such as racism or other prejudices. Professionals with graduate degrees, by contrast, are paragons of enlightenment. Right?\nWell, no. Education too often teaches people to find reasons to do things they shouldn't. The war in Vietnam was started and escalated by educated men of good family, not by illiterate West Virginians married to their cousins. It was educated medical men who castrated and sterilized the "unfit" in these United States, in the early twentieth century. Indiana was a leader in this eugenic practice, which inspired German science and politics later on. Ivy League colleges like Yale had quotas to limit the number of Jews they admitted -- and elaborate pseudo-scientific rationales to keep women out altogether.\nOr consider Rush Limbaugh, son of a corporate lawyer, scion of a well-to-do Republican family. The average dittohead (according to a marketing survey done at the peak of Limbaugh's popularity) has at least a bachelor's degree, an annual income of $53,000 and no more than one Mercedes up on blocks in the front yard.\nI am not romanticizing working people: I know very well, from experience, that we can be as narrow and bigoted as university-educated professionals. The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote to his student Norman Malcolm: "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important problems of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious. ... You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about 'certainty', 'probability', 'perception', etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life and other people's lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important."\nI don't believe these words apply only to philosophy; I'd say they apply to education in general. Or rather, they should, but too often they don't.