Education and Prejudice
Do Liberal Attitudes Lead to a Less Prejudice Society?
The number of people with degrees has been increasing rapidly over the past thirty years, yet racial inequality is still a fundamental part of American society... Why?
Education is touted as a cure for almost all our social and psychological problems. Indeed, the value of a good education is incalculable. It can’t just be measured in number of dollars earned with or without a degree and other such statistics.
It is widely accepted that the more education a person has the more liberal their attitudes are. Similarly, it is not difficult to notice the relationship between geographical areas with the nation’s highest concentration of universities and voting trends.
However, what does this really mean? Do ‘liberal attitudes’ lead to a less prejudice society? The answer would seem to be obviously yes. I know I would rather live in a city where abortion and gay marriage are no-brainers, rather than cornerstone of political debates and national outrage. One would assume that communities that don’t shun interracial relationships and mixed race children are nicer places to live than those where such issues are taboos and horrors to be hidden from the neighbors.
Education clearly plays a role in shaping people’s attitude towards each other and the social and political world we live in. And yet, with the percentage of the population attending institutes of higher education and the number of undergraduate and graduate degrees awarded having dramatically increased over the past 30 years, why is there not a comparable decrease in racial injustice?
For all the information and cross-cultural exchange that occurs during the undergraduate experience, including foreign exchange programs, institutionalized diversity initiatives, and an increase in interdisciplinary cultural studies programs, these educational experiences are not translating into an increase in racial equality? Moreover, students who participate in such programs are already likely to have an interest in culture, race relations, and the problems encountered by minority groups. But what about the rest of the student population not majoring in such programs? What cultural messages do they receive from the standard liberal arts training required for most four-year degrees?
One of the problems is the nature of formal education. National educational institutions were first developed in the industrial era because it became necessary to socialize the rapidly expanding and urbanized population such that they would conform to the economic agenda of the government and the financial elite. Unfortunately, formal education plays the same role today as it did back then.
Liberal arts education fails to generate social justice because it is indeed a fundamental part of the dominant power’s infrastructure. Although it is true one can talk about attitude and ideologies that are more or less liberal, liberal itself fails to be liberal in the sense most of us commonly understand it to mean. Liberal remains very much within the paradigm of national and global inequality, that ensures some have and some do not; privileging individual and property rights over a collective notion of morality.
No one would deny the importance of education in cultivating a more just society. However, if education is to fulfill such a promise it will have to thoroughly examine its own philosophies and practices, from the inside out, redefining liberalism and placing the collective good above individual profiteering.
