Critical Thinking x Education Level

Here are a few of quotes from great thinkers who remind us that education is not synonymous with critical thinking. 

bell hooks speaks of her grandmother:

She was poor all her life. Her memory stands as a challenge to intellectuals, especially those on the left, who assume that the capacity to think critically, in abstract concepts, to be theoretical, is a function of class and educational privilege. Contemporary intellectuals committed to progressive politics must be reminded again and again that the capacity to name something (particularly in writing terms like aesthetics, postmodernism, deconstruction, etc.) is not synonymous with the creation or ownership of the condition or circumstance to which such terms may refer.

p. 112 of Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics by bell hooks

 

And now some reminders from Sarah Smarsh:

Hateful dismissals of those with low incomes, dirty jobs, or "uneducated" backgrounds leave us unable to recognize that such people not only are capable of governing but possess insights necessary for fixing systemic woes from which they have suffered-problems that our credentialed leaders often have a vested interest in failing to solve. I was raised by intelligent people whose creative problem-solving, honed not by textbook theories but by lifelong fights to survive, might have made them fine policymakers.

p. 266 of Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class by Sarah Smarsh

One doesn't need a degree to know the difference between love and hate, right and wrong. One does, in a world of racist messages, need unbiased facts to form a worldview that does not favor Whiteness.

p. 162 of Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class by Sarah Smarsh

From On Class by Deborah Dundas:

The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci used the term "organic intellectuals" to describe people who are not educated in universities but who have organized, who have lifted themselves out of terrible circumstances—people who are smart and who in public debates can often "wipe the floor" intellectually with people who had all the benefits of wealth and privilege, Ontario Coalition of Poverty cofounder John Clarke tells me. They emerge in poor and working-class communities and are "incredibly important people but totally undervalued.”

p.121 of On Class by Deborah Dundas