Majority of Republicans Now Believe Colleges and Universities Have a Negative Effect on America

13 Point Drop Among Republicans 

Founding Father John Adams famously said, “I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.”

Meanwhile, fast forward a few centuries. In the very popular Hulu series “The Handmaid’s Tale,” (and book by Margaret Atwood,) women are prohibited from reading. Anything. (There’s a lot more to the story, but for our purposes that’s what we’re focusing on.) In one scene as two of the main characters try to escape to Canada, they’re hampered because the new regime has removed all the street and subway signs.

The New York Times reported “Margaret Atwood’s rule for herself when writing ‘The Handmaid’s Tale‘ was that everything had to be based on some real-world antecedent. And she was able to combine disparate historical events in plausible — and horrific — ways.”

That belief, that women should be banned from reading, and thus knowledge, stems from religious extremism in Atwood’s book, but it feels like it’s just come one step closer to reality. 

America’s conservatives have now reached a new level of prime, willful ignorance. There’s really no other way to put this: they are embracing stupidity.

“A majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58%) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45% last year. By contrast, most Democrats and Democratic leaners (72%) say colleges and universities have a positive effect, which is little changed from recent years,” the Pew Research Center reports Monday in a just-released survey.

Let’s look at that again.

The majority of Republicans “now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country.”

By a two-to-one margin, 36 percent of Republicans and 72% of Democrats say “say colleges and universities have a positive effect” on the country.

Learning to think, learning about history, politics, art, business, science, agriculture, Shakespeare, the humanities, economics, geometry, theater, biology, law, ethics, and more: these are having “a negative effect on the country,” according to the majority of Republicans/conservatives. 

That viewpoint jumped a whopping 13 percentage points in just one year.

It’s not a stretch to say the 35 to 40 percent of Americans who still give the president a favorable rating and oppose the idea of free college – embraced by several Democrats including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (albeit later) and independent U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders – are responsible for the rapid hatred of higher education.

Some believe education is important only in that it’s a path to higher wages. That’s inane. Higher education, regardless of a student’s major, helps teach them how to think, and how to learn. And that is priceless.

John Adams also said: “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”

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Image by Sally Buck via Flickr and a CC license