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Education, Pseudo-Education, and Racial Discrimination (Tor Guimaraes, USA, 02/21/22 4:16 am)

John Eipper questioned my firm belief that better education is the only remedy capable of curing the mental illness of racial discrimination. Religion has not only failed but often fuels this illness, and wealth seems unrelated.

John referenced Yugoslavia a "well-educated nation prior to its descent into fratricide." Education, just like everything else, must be viewed in context. Education is no panacea; it must be qualified. Some nations are highly educated technologically, financially, socially, religiously, and normally some combination of these. Which combination dominated Serbia or whoever the war instigators were at the time?

Was this Yugoslavian conflict initiated by the NATO/Russia pissing match, and/or perhaps a religious conflict? In such cases only military training and preparation can work. No one will listen to highly educated people.

Let me give JE some help in showing that education is often useless in other domains also. It came to my attention that American (should we say global) oil companies have known a lot about climate change long before our "educated" people did. They planned to take advantage of the expected melting of the Arctic, knowing full well about seas rising, floods, etc. When our scientists sounded the alarm bells the oil companies knew what to do: manage the media, attack the messengers, bribe the governments, create doubt for a few more years or decades if possible. They were very successful; the planet was damned in the search for profits.

As for other examples, the corn, sugar, and tobacco industries have used pseudo-education in the same fashion very successfully; people are damned for profits. For whatever reason, if Yugoslavia was indeed a "well-educated nation," however you defined the term, it sure did not work in Yugoslavia either.

JE comments: Agreed. Pseudo-education is worse than no education at all.  I didn't want to bring Godwin into this, but let's now consider highly educated Nazi Germany, with its "scientific" racism and the like.  To be sure, the decision makers in the short-lived Nazi era had not been educated under the system they created.

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