“Never let your schooling interfere with your education,” goes the apocryphal saying. (No, it’s not from Mark Twain, though the schooled are more likely than the educated to think so.) It is a truth, too, an important one to grasp — especially for pseudo-elites who demean the unschooled as “uneducated.”
Enter ABC network’s Sunny Hostin. Hostin, who’s never sunny, offered election analysis on a recent episode of The View. Trump’s victory wasn’t attributable to black men’s support, she stated, as almost 80 percent of them voted for Kamala Harris. Rather, the problem was that 47 percent of “Latino” men supported Trump along with, by her lights, benighted white women.
“What we did not have is white women,” she said, “who voted about 52 percent for Donald Trump — uneducated white women is my understanding.”
Schooling Sunny
Now, before tackling the deeper matter of education’s true nature, let’s discuss how much Hostin’s analysis reflects it. When explaining Trump’s victory, it’s unremarkable that white women supported him by a narrow margin. For Trump won the same percentage of them in 2020.
In fact, in presidential elections from 1952 through 2024, white women supported the Democrat over the Republican only two of 19 times. So the 2024 result was status quo.
In reality, to win elections, Democrats must capture approximately 90 percent of black voters, 65 percent of both Hispanics and Asian-descent Americans, 75 percent of Jews, and a simple majority of women. Erode these number notably and the Democrats lose.
That’s what happened November 5, too. While 79 percent of Jews and a majority of women overall did vote for Harris, Trump made modest gains relative to 2020 among women (and men). Most strikingly, though, Harris’ black vote share shrank to 83 percent. Trump’s portion of it doubled relative to 2020, rising from eight to 16 percent. The president-elect also won 20-24 percent of black men overall and doubled his support among black men under 45. He won approximately 30 percent of this cohort. (Note: The numbers vary slightly depending on the source.)
Trump’s Hispanic support also rose relative to 2020, from 32 to 45 percent. It increased among ethnically Asian Americans as well, from 34 to 38 percent. This is the demographic story of the 2024 election (it could account for Trump’s 2.5 million popular vote lead). The Democrats’ “rainbow coalition” simply did, to a degree, collapse.
Education Illusion
But then there’s a group that didn’t shift. As Forbes put it earlier this month, “Harris’ 13-point advantage with college-educated voters was virtually unchanged from 2020.” A question, though, are they college “educated” — or just college schooled?
Essentially saying it’s the latter is Fox News opinion contributor Ted Jenkin. Addressing the matter in his recent piece “Democrats don’t understand what it means to be educated,” he mentions Hostin. He then writes:
The Latin root of the word educate is “ex-ducere”: to lead out of. The idea is that the educational process leads you out of your former self into a new self: more knowledgeable, more skilled, wiser, and more experienced. Nowhere in this definition does it say that if you get a diploma, especially a college diploma, that you are more educated. But the democrats have increasingly defined the notion of being educated in America to be inextricably linked with getting a four-year college education. Mind you, that America has plenty of educated derelicts and plenty of kids who graduate college without a clue what they want to do and end up being a Starbucks’ barista while they figure it out.
Schooling Can Be Good — or Bad
To be clear, legitimate college schooling can, as with any legitimate education, be a valuable asset. But this notion of college degree as prerequisite for credibility is an oddity of our times. Think about it:
A degree supposedly has credibility because you’re taught (or maybe just schooled) by other people with degrees. But who schooled them, and who schooled those who schooled them? Follow it back far enough, and you reach the point of the first university’s founding — by someone who didn’t have a “college degree” because there was no college around to bestow it. Thus, if a lack of such schooling discredits one, that founder didn’t have credibility. And then what credibility does his creation, the university, have?
In reality, of course, it’s silly to dismiss a person based on such a superficial measure — whether that person was a university founder a millennium ago, or someone who declines to attend a university today.
So What Is Education?
In answering, first realize that true education and specialization are different things. We certainly need doctors, lawyers, engineers, and IT specialists in the world. Attaining such status alone, however, doesn’t make one “educated.” Nor does getting a degree for the purposes of making a living equate to education. (That’s a “trade school” outcome, whether the institution bears that name or not.)
As to what education is, the answer was provided well by a man who wasn’t college schooled: ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle. As website Philo-Notes wrote last year, Aristotle
viewed education as a means to guide individuals towards eudaimonia, which can be translated as “human flourishing” or “the good life” [no, not partying and material riches].
… Aristotle believed that teachers should create an environment that encourages critical thinking, self-reflection, and independent inquiry.
… For Aristotle, the ultimate purpose of education was the cultivation of virtue. He considered virtue to be an essential goal of human life and believed that education should contribute to the formation of virtuous individuals. Virtue, in Aristotle’s view, was … acquired through the formation of good habits and the exercise of ethical reasoning.
And, thankfully, I can say that, no, this isn’t all Greek to me. In fact, I elaborated upon the virtues in the latest issue of The New American and in a newly released TNA video.
In a nutshell, a true education should bring us closer to being a Renaissance man. That is, a jack of all trades and master of some — even if actually achieving this lofty status remains elusive.
Oh, and one more thing about the truly educated: They never look down on the merely unschooled.
