On New York University’s Utterly Cringeworthy Attempt To Get Protesters To “Educate Themselves”
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My least favorite type of tweet from a stranger — more annoying, I would argue, than tweets demanding that I die, kill myself, fuck myself, or go to a concentration camp — is a tweet inviting me to “educate [my]self” about some topic so that I will see the error of my ways.
To a certain type of bland midwit, all political disagreement can be boiled down to a lack of education. Not on their part, of course — but rather on the part of their ideological adversaries. If those folks would only educate themselves, they’d realize how idiotic it is for them to believe what they believe.
Even setting aside how unrealistic a model of political psychology this is, what’s so grating here is the smarmy disingenuousness of it. The person inviting me to “educate [my]self” doesn’t really mean that, at least not in the traditional sense of an education any reasonable person would consider worthwhile. Rather, what they’re saying is that they want me to read a small pile of rhetoric arguing for a specific claim, after which I will dutifully return to inform them that, well, my bad — now that I have Done The Work, I realize that they were correct all along. I just hadn’t read the right pile of rhetoric!
People who ask you to “educate [your]self,” in short, aren’t interested in anyone actually being educated. Not you, and definitely not them. The last thing they want is for education to do what it is supposed to do in its purest form: to teach people that the world is complicated, that differing views can coexist, and that otherwise similar people driven by different values can come to radically different conclusions about the world.
Maybe that’s why I find New York University’s dumb disciplinary stunt so annoying.
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