By Sam White
Friday, October 14, 2016
Speaking during the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party
conference recently, Universities Minister Jo Johnson highlighted the link
between levels of education and European Union referendum voting when he said:
There was a correlation between
levels of university attendance and a propensity to vote Brexit. There was a
correlation between levels of education generally and a likelihood for voting
for Brexit.
Which means there’s a huge
opportunity for universities to play the part they want to play in widening
participation and ensuring that more people, particularly from disadvantaged
background, get a chance to go to university and share in the benefits that
higher education can bring.
One of those benefits, presumably, is the pleasure of
understanding why Britain should remain in the EU.
Johnson, who backed Remain, is not alone in blaming
Brexit on a lack of education. Remainers have made much of the fact that 71
percent of graduates voted to remain in the EU, while only 34 percent of those
who left education at 16 did so.
Educators Have
Embraced the Message of EU Integration
However, another reason why graduates would vote to
remain is overlooked: in higher education particularly, but in all levels of education,
there is a systemic bias toward the perceived values of EU integration, and
toward the wider ideals of globalism. The longer a young person remains within
that system, the more likely they are to be ideologically shaped by pro-EU
sentiments.
As LSE Professor Emeritus Alan Sked put it in a blog post
early this year,
“the letters pages of Britain’s
quality newspapers have been full of pleas from distinguished vice-chancellors
and professors, all mobilised in serried ranks, to plead the case for Britain
remaining in the European Union. Their ostensible excuse is the need to
preserve research funding from the EU… Their true motive, of course, is simply
political bias… they have disgraced themselves and demeaned their high academic
positions.”
Then there’s the EU-funded Jean Monnet programme, an
initiative to further university teaching and research into European
integration. In a 2014 essay, Joseph Weiler, a Jean Monnet-chaired professor in
New York, wrote explicitly that “part of our mission as Jean Monnet
Professor[s] is to disseminate the values of European integration.”
University
Groupthink Led to Brexit Bewilderment
But ideological bias in education starts long before
university, and it is subtle and embedded. Look at the TES post-referendum, and
you’ll find plenty of distressed consternation and agonizing over how to cope
with Brexit. It’s as if a whole way of life was overturned, and we’re about to
descend into a new dark age. A YouGov poll found before the vote that 70
percent of teachers were in favor of staying in the EU.
More revealing, though, are the stories
shared by a Brexit-supporting teacher named Kevin Rooney pre-referendum. He
speaks of:
“the visceral reaction of barely
disguised contempt whenever I announce, to my education colleagues, that I am
voting Brexit. The unspoken assumption is that we educated types are “inners”
and the uneducated—mostly working-class types—are “outers”. If you are opposed
to the European Union then you must be at least a bit racist and xenophobic;
though this contempt for Leave supporters is rarely made explicit in public
debate.”
This speaks to the teaching community’s shameless
ignorance of the referendum’s complexities—and to their illiteracy on the
varied range of opinions on both sides. It also indicates an utter disregard
for impartiality or plurality of opinion, reducing the entire debate to a
lazy-minded collection of false choices: smart or stupid, fair-minded or
racist, in or out.
If this is the attitude taken by school teachers toward
their colleagues, can you imagine the message they are imparting to children:
day in, day out, perhaps explicitly, but perhaps below the surface and between
the lines? Were pupils encouraged to find out the facts, history, and
intentions of the EU? Were they instructed to engage with the issues
intellectually and come to their own evidence-backed conclusions? To challenge,
assume nothing, and inquire?
Or were they fed dodgy prejudices and broad-brush,
counter-factual generalizations? Was the issue reduced to gut feeling and moral
conjecture? Were the very real problems endemic to the EU addressed at all?
How to Promote
Diversity of Opinion
The referendum has polarized these education issues with
stark drama. But of course the problem runs wider than one single event. We
face the inevitable problems resulting from an alarming lack of political
diversity in schools and universities. There are endless high-minded drives for
diversity in education, the arts, and workplaces. But these efforts only aim
for a diversity of superficial identity: race, sexual orientation, gender.
Diversity of opinion, on the other hand, is less valued. Any deviance from the liberal progressive line (as the meaning
of “liberal progressive” is gradually reversed) is seen as ignorant at best, a
sign of obstinate bigotry at worst.
Where America leads, Britain often follows. So let’s take
a look at the following graph, taken from the Heterodox Academy website. The
Academy’s mission is “to increase viewpoint diversity” in higher education in
the U.S. Their graph shows data taken from the Higher Education Research
Institute, tracking political views among professors in US colleges since 1989.
The uniform consensus among UK schools and universities
on the Brexit issue strongly suggests that the same problem has taken hold of
the Britain’s education industry.The trend here is unmistakable: as right wing,
conservative views decrease, so left wing, liberal points of view become
increasingly dominant.
Our Problem Isn’t
Too Few Graduates
Diversity of political, philosophical, and ideological
opinion should be a cornerstone of education. Without this diversity, schools
cease teaching and begin indoctrinating. Perhaps that sounds hyperbolic, but
given the hysterical reaction to the referendum among many Remainers, it
already appears to be happening.
Weeping in the streets is not a balanced reaction to losing
a vote—it’s a sign of personal trauma. Who instilled such a deeply
emotion-based faith in the profound virtue of the EU? When did these distraught
acolytes reach the stage that having their views challenged resulted not in
disappointment, but in tears and despair? The scenes witnessed raise some
troubling questions.
Non-graduates didn’t vote to leave the EU because they
were ignorant of its benefits. They voted Leave because they could look at more
than just its benefits. They were able to process the issues with significantly
less bias than graduates, and were capable of making their decision impartially
and without the risk of being hectored and falsely shamed by their peers.
The problem we have is not that too few people go to
university. It’s that the growing lack of political diversity on campus is
hindering graduates’ abilities to look beyond their own points of view.
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