Why "Conservatives" Find Education Dangerous

Nothing is more terrifying and dangerous to religious fundamentalists and "social conservatives" of all stripes than education, especially education which teaches one to use and analyze actual facts and logic and reason.  Be it the mullahs in Iran or Saudi Arabia or the fundamentalist preachers in America's evangelical churches, education is the enemy of often ludicrous dogma and manipulating congregations to mindlessly follow dictates that do not hold up when confronted with science, modern medical/mental health knowledge and simply reasoning.  Hence, the efforts of Florida and other states with Republican controlled legislatures to ban LGBT history, an honest account of the nation's history, and other aspects of objective reality as noted in a recent column:

I owe a lot to Gary Mahoney.  He was the campus conservative back in the middle ’70s, when I was a student at the University of Southern California and we went at it hammer and tongs a few times on the opinion pages of the Daily Trojan. I no longer recall the details of our disagreements. What I do remember is realizing that he was good and that I had to up my game — tighten my reasoning, sharpen my logic — if I hoped to stay in the ring with him.

I value those years less for any specific thing I learned in class than for the fact that I learned how to think. Not “what” to think, but how, i.e., how to gather and evaluate information, how to analyze and extrapolate from it, how to defend my ideas in the scrum of intellectual conflict.

That’s a lesson students will be denied if Republicans like Ron DeSantis get their way. Last week, Florida’s governor signed a bill requiring the state’s public colleges and universities to survey students and faculty on their ideological beliefs. The aim, he claims, is to prevent schools from “indoctrinating” students. DeSantis has hinted that those failing to show “intellectual diversity” will face budget cuts. . . . Florida seeks not to further intellectual diversity, but to prevent it.

Meaning, it aims to protect kids raised on mom and dad’s steady diet of Fox “News” and Breitbart from the shock of having any ideas they’ve thereby imbibed challenged in the outside world. Which is hypocritical on its face. After all, conservatives once — not unreasonably — chided liberals for trying to bubble-wrap students with trigger warnings and safe spaces. Now they use force of law to do the very same thing.

[I]t’s none of the state’s business what you or I think. It should be likewise obvious that this law will stifle debate and muzzle instructors and is thus antithetical to the mission of our colleges and universities.

There is no mystery why conservatives find education dangerous. A 2015 Pew Research Center study quantified that the better educated one is, the more likely one is to hold liberal beliefs. . . . . it’s because once you learn how to think, you’re less susceptible to thin reasoning and easy answers. And increasingly, that’s all conservatism’s got.

That may not have been true — or at least, may have been less true — decades ago. But back then, the right had some intellectual underpinning, had yet to devolve into the twitching id of perpetual resentment now on daily display.

[I]s anyone overawed by the profundity of Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene? How about Louie Gohmert? Or even Ron DeSantis?

An opinion one can’t defend — using actual facts and recognizable reason — is an opinion not worth having. At some level, conservatives must know they fail that standard, so they work to undermine it instead, to make the world safe for ignorance.

Teach your children well, the songwriter said. But this is the opposite of that.