Education is a cult in and of itself — most follow its scriptures in just as similar a fashion as they would a priest. People just don’t think that hard about things outside of their specialization (and often enough, not even then), and end up trapped in all sorts of belief systems, including “education” and “science” (have you ever taken a look at “I fucking love science” fb pages? Its called science, and its followers believe in science, but that group has nothing to do with it. Its just a bunch of rituals that eventualy produce an effect, with any arbitrary reason given)
Its not a fix on its own, just accidentally more (likely to be) correct than psychics, from the perspective of the believer.
Claims that education, or atheism, are cult-like or religion-like are common enough, but they require ignoring what an education actually means and instead assuming it's just deferring to a (different) bunch of books.
An education gives you critical thinking, the ability to rationally consider, deduce, conclude, the willingness to discover, to be wrong, etc.
I guess gp was describing someone who was eager to discover, but certainly lacked an understanding or developed abilities around critical thinking.
It only gives you critical thinking if you... critically think about it. Not by its very nature.
>they require ignoring what an education actually means and instead assuming it's just deferring to a (different) bunch of books.
But thats the key. People do that. All the time. In practice, education doesn’t follow your idealized version of it. Education, by which I mean western education, struggles to even resemble the ideal, and if anyone tells you to go get educated (thinking of the ideal), they will lead you to a very different path, because it’s done as an accident of the education system (that is, a mistake, a rarity).
My point is that people don’t think that hard about what they learn; regardless of the source. All the fantasicism and cargo culting of programming communities are a direct result of this: fully educated people falling prey to the same mistakes you can accuse any religious follower of.
Both (educated) liberals and conservatives accuse each other of these mistakes on a daily basis.
Education isn’t magic; you should be applying the same skepticism to it as anything else, and it becomes fairly obvious that people can and do make the same mistakes they do with the bible as they do with the textbook
I meant that its a cult insofar as any form of mass teaching lends itself to cult behavior; it elevated and unquestioned status exasperates the issue, especially when used as a blind solution to any problem at hand (e.g., only an idiot would go to a psychic; go to a teacher instead... approach both similarly, and your outcome is only accidentally more correct); but in reality, its no magic bullet, and lends itself to the same issues (more problematically, the educated tend to believe they are less susceptible by virtue of their education, despite being offered few such protections)
The bible too isn’t bad on its own... a good wholesome christian turns out to follow a pretty good set of morals.
My railing is against the belief the education is inherently better in these things than any other form of teaching (religions, myths, tradition, etc), but its not — critical thinking is outside of it, and most won’t partake in it regardless of which teaching methodology. The only saving grace is that education supposedly embraces it as an operation, where perhaps the christians might have once damned you for it, but in practice, education systems try quite hard to minimize the act (it would slow down standardized teaching, and memorization far simpler, scalable and cheaper to teach)
I just don't see a significant difference between the modern education... and any other. It happens to be more practical, useful and even more correct, but the majority of its believers mistreat, and misunderstand it, just as they would anything else.
It's definitely better, but not fundamentally superior. (this perhaps is the troll, the blasphemy, the should-be-made illegal belief)
>I feel that you're conflating your experiences with, or observations of, bad teaching -- with education in the general / abstract.
I'm arguing that, in practice, education is not education, and thus telling people to get educated as a solution to some mistake like following psychics blindly, is based on the exact same mistake that the target person made. If you critically think about education as it occurs in practice, it rarely offers critical thinking; it theoretically does, just as the bible theoretically offers you inner peace, but in practice, it does not. And its difficult to argue that the (now like ggggp) gp meant your idealized form of it, because you wouldn't get the solution from the default form of education. But the mistake was made, because of a blind faith in how the system describes itself (your idealized version), rather than an understanding of how it actually functions.
Also what do you have against a good wholesome christian/hindu/muslim/etc? Ignoring the god-ly aspect, religion passes down a culture, and they tend to be pretty damn good ones at that, if they don't run off to some extreme (the good, wholesome description protects us from that scenario). Of course they have their history... but again, so does any other. A religious or geographic one, they all have something to be ashamed of. It's not like the heathens and worshippers of science are without fault as well.
Blind faith in education is as dumb as blind faith in a psychic. ...and it turns out education doesn't stop you from executing blind faith.
All a cult is in this view is an unwavering, unthinking group following over some belief system; in that sense, any form of education (of which the bible, and schooling, are just one of) can turn into a cult. Its not surprising that students are just as susceptible as some midwestern hick. Its also not that surprising that people take those teachings differently, and some treat that knowledge in cultish fashion, and others don’t.
And its not that surprising that people don’t realize this occurs, and spreads the word blindly, with unwavering faith in its problem-solving ability
I'd agree with the first part of your statement. Though what it means is that anyone's worldview is a flawed model from the start better described as a cult than as the truth.
Its not a fix on its own, just accidentally more (likely to be) correct than psychics, from the perspective of the believer.