Lies My Teacher Told Me (44 page)

Educated people are more informed and critical, hence more able to sift through
misinformation and conclude that the Vietnam War was not in our best interests,
politically or morally.

Educated people are more tolerant. There were elements of racism and ethnocentrism in our
conduct of the wareducated people are less likely to accept such prejudice.

Less-educated people, being of lower occupational status, were more liKely to be employed
in a war-related industry or in the armed forces themselves, hence had self-interest in
being prowar.

There is nothing surprising here. Most people feel that schooling is a good thing and
enables us to sift facts, weigh evidence, and think rationally. An educated people has
been said to be a bulwark of democracy.

However, the truth is quite different. Educated people disproportionately supported the
Vietnam War. Table 3 shows the actual outcome of the January 1971 poll:

Table 3

Adults with:

College High School Education Education Grade School Education 100%

Total Adults 100%

60%

75%

80%

73%

40%

25%

20%

27%

% for withdrawal of U.S. troops (Doves]

% against withdrawal Of U.S. troops (Hawks)

Totals 100% 100%

These results surprise even some professional social scientists. Twice as high a
proportion of college-educated adults, 40 percent, were hawks, compared to only 20 percent
of adults with grade school educations. And this poll was no isolated phenomenon. Similar
results were registered again and again, in surveys by Harris, NORC, and others. Way back
in 1965, when only 24 percent of the nation agreed that the United States “made a mistake”
in sending troops to Vietnam, 28 percent of the grade school-educated felt so. Later, when
less than half of the college-educated adults favored pullout, among the grade school
educated 61 percent did. Throughout our long involvement in Southeast Asia, on issues
related to Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, or Laos, the grade schooleducated were always the most dovish, the college-educated the most hawkish.

Today mosj Americans agree that the Vietnam War was a mistake, politically and morally;
so do most political analysts, including such men as Robert McNamara and Clark Clifford,
who waaed the war.16 If we concur with this o now conventional wisdom, then we must concede that the more educated a person was, the more likely s/he was to be wrong about the war.

Why did educated Americans support the war? When my audiences learn that educated people
were more hawkish, they scurry about concocting new explanations. Since they are still
locked into their presumption that educated people are more intelligent and have more good
will than the less educated, their theories have to strain to explain why less-educated
Americans were right. The most popular revamped theory asserts that since working-class
young men bore the real cost of the war, “naturally” they and their families opposed it.
This explanation seems reasonable, for it does credit the working class with opposing the
war and with a certain brute rationality. But it reduces the thinking of the working class
to a crude personal cost-benefit analysis, implicitly denying that the less educated might
take society as a whole into consideration. Thus this hypothesis diminishes the position
of the working classwhich was more correct than that of the educated, after allto a mere
reflex based on self-interest. It is also wrong. Human nature doesn't work that way.
Research has shown that people of whatever educational level who expect to go to war tend
to support that war, because people rarely don't believe in something they plan to do. Working-class
young men who enlisted or looked forward to being drafted could not easily influence their
destinies to avoid Vietnam, but they could change their attitudes about the war to be more
positive. Thus, cognitive dissonance helps explain why young men of draft age supported
the war more than older men, and why men supported the war more than women. While
less-educated families with sons in the Vietnam conflict often formed pockets of support
for the war, such pockets were exceptions to the dovishness that pervaded the
less-educated segments of our populace.

By now my audiences are keen to learn why educated Americans were more hawkish. Two social
processes, each tied to schooling, can account for educated Americans' support of the
Vietnam War. The first can be summarized by the term allegiance. Educated adults tend to be successful and earn high incomespartly because schooling leads
to better jobs and higher incomes, but mainly because high parental incomes lead to more
education for their offspring. Also, parents transmit affluence and education directly
to their children. Successful Americans do not usually lay their success at their parents'
doorstep, however. They usually explain their accomplishments as owing to their own
individual characteristics, so they see American society as meritocratic. They achieved
their own success; other people must be getting their just desserts. Believing that
American ociery is open to individual input, the educated wellto-do tend to agree with
society's decisions and feel they had a hand in forming them. They identify more with our
society and its policies. We can use the term vested interest here, so long as we realize we are referring to an ideological interest or need, a need to
come to terms with the privilege with which one has been blessed, not simple economic
self-interest. In this sense, educated successful people have a vested interest in
believing that the society that helped them be educated and successful is fair. As a
result, those in the upper third of our educational and income structure are more likely
to show allegiance to society, while those in the lower third are more likely to be
critical of it.

The other process causing educated adults to be more likely to support the Vietnam War can
be summarized under the rubric socialization. Sociologists have long agreed that schools are important socializing agents in our
society. “Socializing” in this context does not mean hobnobbing around a punch bowl but
refers to the process of learning and internalizing the basic social rules language,
norms, etiquettenecessary for an individual to function in society. Socialization is not
primarily cognitive. We are not persuaded rationally not to pee in the living room, we arc required not to. We then internalize and obey this rule even when no authority figure lurks to
enforce it. Teachers may try to convince themselves that education's main function is to
promote inquiry, not iconography but in fact the socialization function of schooling
remains dominant at least through high school and hardly disappears in college.
Education as socialization tells people what to think and how to act and requires them to
conform. Education as socialization influences students simply to accept the tightness of
our society. American history textbooks overtly tell us to be proud of America. The more
schooling, the more socialization, and the more likely the individual will conclude that
America is good.

Both the allegiance and socialization processes cause the educated to believe that what
America does is right. Public opinion polls show the nonthinking results. In late spring
1966, just before we began bombing Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam, Americans split
50/50 as to whether we should bomb these targets. After the bombing began, 85 percent
favored the bombing while only 15 percent opposed. The sudden shift was the result, not
the cause, of the government's decision to bomb. The same allegiance and socialization
processes operated again when policy changed in the opposite direction. In 1968 war
sentiment was waning; but 51 percent of Americans opposed a bombing halt, partly because
the United States was still bombing North Vietnam. A month later, after President Johnson
announced a bombing halt, 71 percent favored the halt. Thus 23 percent of our citizens
changed their minds within a month, mirroring the shift in government policy. This swaying
of thought by policy affects attitudes on issues ranging from our space program to environmental policy and shows the so-called “silent majority” to be an unthinking
majority as well. Educated people are overrepresented among these straws in the wind.

We like to think of education as a mix of thoughtful learning processes. Allegiance and
socialization, however, are intrinsic to the role of schooling in our society or any
hierarchical society. Socialist leaders such as Fidel Castro and Mao Tse-tung vastly
extended schooling in Cuba and China in part because they knew that an educated people is
a socialized populace and a bulwark of allegiance. Education works the same way here: it
encourages students not to think about society but merely to trust that it is good. To the
degree that American history in particular is celebratory, it offers no way to
understand any problemsuch as the Vietnam War, poverty, inequality, international haves
and have-nots, environmental degradation, or changing sex rolesthat has historical
roots. Therefore we might expect that the more traditional schooling in history that Americans have, the less they will understand Vietnam or any other historically based problem. This is why educated
people were more hawkish on the Vietnam War.

Table 2 supplies an additional example of nonthinking by the educated and affluent: they
are wrong about who supported the war. By a nine to one margin, the hundreds of educated
people who have filled out Table 1 believed that educated Americans were more dovish. Thus
the Vietnam exercise suggests two errors by the elite. The first error that educated
people made was being excessively hawkish back in 1966, 1968, or 1971. The second error
they made was in filling out Table 1.

Why have my audiences been so wrong in remembering or deducing who opposed the Vietnam
War? One reason is that Americans like to believe that schooling is a good thing. Most
Americans tend automatically to equate educated with informed or tolerant.TM Traditional purveyors of social studies and American history seize upon precisely this
belief to rationalize their enterprise, claiming that history courses lead to a more
enlightened citizenry. The Vietnam exercise suggests the opposite is more likely true.

Audiences would not have been so easily fooled if they had only recalled that educated
people were and are more likely to be Republicans, while high school dropouts are more
likely to be Democrats. Hawkish right-wing Republicans, including rhe core supporters of
Barry Goldwater in 1964, of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and of groups like the John Birch
Society, come disproportionately from the most educated and affluent segments of our
society, particularly dentists and physicians. So we should not be surprised that
education correlates with hawkishness. At the other end of the social status spectrum, although most African
Americans, like most whites, initially supported U.S. intervention in Vietnam, blacks were
always more questioning and more dovish than whites, and African American leadersMuhammad
Ali, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm Xwere prominent among the early opponents of the
the war.

American history textbooks help perpetrate the archetype of the blindly patriotic hardhat
by omitting or understating progressive elements in the working class. Textbooks do not
reveal that CIO unions and some working-class fraternal associations were open to all when
many chambers of commerce and country clubs were still white-only. Few textbooks tell of
organized labor's role in the civil rights movement, including the 1963 March on
Washington. Nevertheless many members of my audiences are aware that educated Americans
are likely to be Republicans, hard-liners on defense, and right-wing extremists. Some
members of my audiences know about Goldwater voters, Muhammad Ali's induction refusal,
Birchers and education, or labor unions and the war information that would have helped
them fill in the blanks in Table 1 correctly. Somehow, though, they never think to apply
such knowledge. Most people fill out the table in a daze without ever using what they
know. Their education and their position in society cause them not to think.

Such nonthinking occurs most commonly when society is the subject. “One of the major
duties of an American citizen is to analyze issues and interpret events intelligently,” Discovering American History exhorts students. Our textbooks fail miserably at this task. The Vietnam exercise shows
how bad the situation really is. Most college students, even high school students, would
never put up with such obvious contradictions when thinking about, say, chemistry. When
the subject is the social world, however, they are often guilty of nonsensical
reasoning. Sociology professors are amazed and depressed at the level of thinking about
society displayed each fall by the upper-middle-class students entering their first-year
classes. These students cannot use the past to illuminate the present and have no inkling
of causation in history, so they cannot think coherently about social life. Extending the
terminology of Jules Henry, we might use “social stupidity” to describe the illogical
intellectual process and conclusions that result.

Students who have taken more mathematics courses are more proficient at math than other
students. The same is true in English, foreign language studies, and almost every other
subject. Only in history is stupidity the result of more, not less, schooling. Why do
students buy into the mindless “analysis” they encounter in American history courses? For
some students, it is in their ideological interest. Upper-middle-class students are comforted by a view of society that
emphasizes schooling as the solution to intolerance, poverty, even perhaps war. Such a
rosy view of education and its effects lets them avoid considering the need to make major
changes in other institutions. To the degree that this view permeates our society,
students automatically think well of education and expect the educated to have seen
through the Vietnam War.