The Education Cure

Speaking at the UN, George W. Bush says:

Better education unleashes the talent and potential of its citizens, and adds to the prosperity of all of us. Better education promotes better health and greater independence. Better education increases the strength of democracy, and weakens the appeal of violent ideologies. So the United States is joining with nations around the world to help them provide a better education for their people.

Unfortunately, as Kay Steiger points out, "it's been pretty well documented that the most effective terrorists are the highly educated ones." Indeed, while there are lots of good reasons to want to improve school around the world, preventing people from becoming terrorists isn't a good one at all. Check out Peter Bergen and Michael Lind on what actually motivates terrorists, or the 2005 op-ed on "The Madrassa Myth" that he co-wrote with Swati Pandey taking on a variant of the education story which holds that terrorists come from madrassas and that madrassas could be crowded out with better schools.

Throughout history, really, there's no reason to think that education weakens the appeal of violent ideologies. Pol Pot went to EFR in Paris and Lenin went to Kazan State University. When Marc Sageman looked at al-Qaeda biographies he found that "Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion."

Comments

I don't know that this is a legitimate rejoinder. I really don't think Bush is talking about education at the individual level, but is really saying that a more educated society tends to be less prone to harboring radical or militaristic ideologies. The (often highly educated) radicals/terrorists/militants rely to a great extent upon the lack of education (and the attendant lack of prosperity) to fuel their hunt for power.

Posted by Glenn | September 25, 2007 1:45 PM

At the same time, creating successful economies and societies, especially ones not based on oil, are necessary paths to weeding out the appeal of terrorism and radical politics on a large scale. Czarist Russia and Cambodia under Lon Nol were failing societies. Saudi Arabia and the House of Saud and probably the Moubarek regime in Egypt have long been on life support. Education makes for a more effective terrorist on the individual level, but having a more educated populace in general helps to build a more successful society that reduces the humiliation that leads to terrorism instead of other paths to political participation.

Posted by Reality Man | September 25, 2007 1:45 PM

I would agree with Glenn and Reality Man that there's an apparent correlation between the level of education in a society and it's propensity for radical violence. However, a correlation does not imply a causal link between the two. Matt's point stands. Even if we agree that societies with less education tend to produce more terrorists, how come most of these terrorists seem to be among the more educated members of said societies?

Posted by Khaled | September 25, 2007 2:02 PM

I suppose Nazi Germany was a fairly well-educated society.

I think we're talking about moral education here. Terrorists may be highly educated, but their moral compass is totally fucked.

Posted by Bill | September 25, 2007 2:03 PM

Thoroughgoing secularized societies, otoh - now there's a concept. The 9/11 hijackers, based in Europe, looked elsewhere to receive their anti-secular indoctrination, did they not.

Posted by Bill | September 25, 2007 2:06 PM

What part of Lenin's ideology was particularly more violent than that of your average world leader (and please, don't equate Stalin with Lenin.)

Posted by Freddie | September 25, 2007 2:11 PM

They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists.

Well, I suppose we have to be thankful for Ayn Rand and glibertarianism, since that presumably keeps all manner of misfit American engineering types out of mischief.

Snark aside, let's talk about the confluence of education and opportunity: young men in Belfast council estates got roped into paramilitary activity because there was fuck-all to do with their lives; the smart kids got on the ferry and went to the mainland.

Posted by pseudonymous in nc | September 25, 2007 2:13 PM

so... less education for all!!

Posted by right | September 25, 2007 2:14 PM

Bill-

Weimar Germany had its share of troubles, I think. I can't speak directly to how educated they were, but times were bad.

Posted by southpaw | September 25, 2007 2:15 PM

I mean, look at what a bunch of well-educated Americans are doing to people who live in other countries.

Posted by ML | September 25, 2007 2:20 PM

Freddie--

The part where Lenin said:

"The overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be achieved only by the proletariat becoming the ruling class, capable of crushing the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie, and of organizing all the working and exploited people for the new economic system. The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population - the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians - in the work of organizing a socialist economy."

-The State and Revolution, 1917 (emphasis added)

Posted by southpaw | September 25, 2007 2:23 PM

Ah, more Utopian blathering at the UN. Bush makes no more sense here talking about education than Jeffrey Sachs does with his anti-poverty distribution schemes. The reality is that most countries that are miserable places are miserable because they are poorly governed, and there's little any outsider can do to change this. Zimbabwe has a wealth of natural resources but is on the verge of famine due to horrendous rule; Haiti once supplied a third of the French Empire's GDP, but has been a worsening basket pretty much since then.

Also, as Matt says, not a whole lot of correlation between poor education and terrorism, in fact, possibly a negative correlation.

Posted by Fred | September 25, 2007 2:29 PM

And that compares disfavorably to any other world leader calling for military power? That's very thin gruel, my friend.

Posted by Freddie | September 25, 2007 2:29 PM

I thought it was fairly well established (and fairly non-controversial) that societies that breed terrorists tend to be ones where there is mismatch between education and economic opportunity. Late 19th century Tsarist Russian, late 19th century Austria Hungary, early 20th century China and modern Egypt and Saudi Arabia are all similar in that they have rapidly growing populations of young men with unprecedented access to higher education, but who, upon receiving their degrees, find their opportunities to advance severly restricted by an anachronistic rigidly authoritarian society that doesn't reward that education. Social unreast in the West in the late 60s and early 70s was also arguably in large part a result of more educated boomer youth entering the economy than the economy could productively absorb. Weimar Germany was also a society with a large number of unemployed educated young people.

Posted by vanya_6724 | September 25, 2007 2:38 PM

"Pol Pot went to EFR in Paris and Lenin went to Kazan State University..."

...George W. Bush went to Harvard and Dick Cheney went to the University of Wyoming....

Posted by D. Eisenhower | September 25, 2007 2:51 PM

I dunno if anybody has done a formal study of this, but, from what I can tell, vanya's point definitely (as vanya suggests) applies to Weimar Germany. There were lots of educated people, but due to increasing numbers of alter-kockers sticking around on their jobs, fewer opportunities for the new generation.

I've long wondered, e.g., how much of the opposition to "Jewish Science" was fueled by a bunch of young academic types hoping to kick established scientists out to pasture so that those young-'uns could take those prime academic positions. It just so happened that the generation that was being edged out happened to be heavily Jewish (because it was a generation in which many Jews finally had the opportunity to obtain high levels of secular education, but still had enough of the rigourous background of Jewish education so that way they'd be in a position to excel).

Posted by DAS | September 25, 2007 2:55 PM

Huh? How many world leaders call for military power against their own people?

Posted by southpaw | September 25, 2007 2:56 PM

I think you're missing the forest for the trees. It is quite reasonable for terrorist leaders to be highly educated, because the kind of organizing, planning and self-motivation required to be a good student is also useful in being a good mass-murderer.

But when we look at the supporters of radical figures - the people who provide the cash and the "manpower", we typically find that they are undereducated and easily swayed by rhetoric - look at the evangelical community in the US. My last read was that evangelicals are less well-informed than average, earn less and have less education.

So what I'm saying is that while the leaders of the terrorist movements are well-educated, I doubt seriously they have legions of well-educated followers. More likely they have legions of ignorant, weak-minded followers, with little to live for. Educate the weak-minded followers, and the leaders, no matter how well-educated, will be far less potent.

Posted by jb | September 25, 2007 2:56 PM

Matt's right. Revolutionary ideologies tend to take root in the educated classes, not among the poor and uneducated. The latter group, however, can be recruited in large numbers once a revolutionary movement is well-established.

It does seem to me that most revolutionary movements feed off of inequality and resentment, but not in a reductive economic sense. These groups are often full of educated and relatively well-to-do students who have cultivated anger about the injustice in the world, but also have the means and the leisure time to devote to the cause. Vanya also makes a good point about the disparity between education and opportunity as a motivating factor.

That's not to say that rising levels of education and prosperity in the Islamic world would not eventually diminish the appeal of Jihadism, or be a generally good thing irrespective of terrorism, but it's a mistake to think of this as a panacea. IMO, the most important element in defusing violent ideologies is the development of moderate alternatives that address the perceived injustices. For example: European social democracy as an alternative to Communism.

To break the back of violent Islamism, we're going to need to make peace with non-violent Islamism, as in Turkey and (potentially) in Egypt.

P.S. For Freddie

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | September 25, 2007 3:02 PM

I always was suspicious of the engineers at my school. I think it was the over-sized protractors.

Posted by Brad | September 25, 2007 3:03 PM

When Marc Sageman looked at al-Qaeda biographies he found that "Three-quarters were professionals or semi- professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion."

Bullshit. They may be failed engineering and science students who call themselves engineers and scientists, but they are not engineers and scientists. Any competent scientist could do more damage with a $500.00 limit credit card than any terrorist does with a car bomb.

Posted by Njorl | September 25, 2007 3:15 PM

Re Matthew's comment "Throughout history, really, there's no reason to think that education weakens the appeal of violent ideologies "
----------
Matthew's right -- napalm and the nuclear bomb weren't created by high school dropouts.

But maybe we're not talking about "terrorists". After all, napalm and the atomic bombs were only used to kill soldiers in WWII -- not civilians, women and children.

Posted by Don Williams | September 25, 2007 3:17 PM

I concur with what jb writes.

The people commonly referred to as "terrorists" are hardly a monolithic group. That applies even if the discussion is limited to those who carry out their acts in the cause of Islamist extremism.

Spectacular coordinated attacks such as those on Sept 11 could only have been carried out by a highly organized group of well-trained individuals. On the other hand, attacks such as suicide and car bombings do not require great skill, training, or coordination.

Looking beyond the Islamic extremist sub-culture, I should point out that there are far more educational and economic opportunities in this country than in the countries that produced the 9/11 hijackers and yet that didn't weaken the "appeal of violent ideologies" for people like Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph.

Posted by "Fair and Balanced" Dave | September 25, 2007 3:19 PM

Spreading education worldwide is very noble objective. However what exactly is the US doing to sponsor learning worldwide? I'm not saying we are doing nothing (although my guess is that we are doing squat), but there is nothing tangible that I am aware of. If indeed we are doing something positive then why not give it some publicity? Might provide some balance to all the free publicity we get for dropping bombs and/or threatening to drop more bombs.

Posted by 2cynicalbyhalf | September 25, 2007 3:32 PM

Obviously you wouldn't try to counter any specific ideology with general education, you counter it with a specific counter-ideology. The war of ideas, etc.

However what a sustained education program on the part of the U.S. government would do is make the U.S. look a lot better in the eyes of the world. Which may not defeat radical Islam but respect and legitimacy are really very important for foreign policy.

Posted by Korha | September 25, 2007 4:15 PM

Njorl:

While I agree with you about the potential deadliness of scientists (Back off, man!), don't you think that the trouble is that they're unemployed, not failed engineers and scientists?

Posted by Klug | September 25, 2007 4:27 PM

How many world leaders call for military power against their own people? - southpaw

Define "their own people" (as opposed to, e.g., "our enemy who is not us even if s/he pretends to be") ...

Posted by DAS | September 25, 2007 4:40 PM

This is a very interesting thread that makes many cogent arguments.

Marc Sageman, via Matt: "They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion."

People with a background in the hard sciences often seem to be particularly vulnerable to simplistic, reductionist ideologies. In the U.S., the ideology in question is often libertarianism, sometimes coupled with a strong Dawkins-style hatred of all organized religion. In the Islamic world, the ideology is often Islamic fundamentalism.

Why is this? Partially it's because these people often have little exposure to the humanities or social sciences. They tend to see the entire world through the lens of their specialty; in science, things often really are black-and-white, with only one right answer; the world of human interaction is of course far more complex, but they don't seem to get that. Another aspect is self-selection: people drawn to the hard sciences often have Asperger's syndrome or mild autism, which fosters these sort of thinking patterns.

Vanya also makes a very interesting point: "societies that breed terrorists tend to be ones where there is mismatch between education and economic opportunity." If this is true, it doesn't bode well for the future of the United States. Look at all the unemployed and underemployed humanities PhDs out there, and all the scientists and technicians laid off due to offshoring...

Posted by Josh G. | September 25, 2007 4:49 PM

Well, better education might not prevent terrorism, but it might prevent world leaders from using pronouns that don't agree with their antecedents. "Better education unleashes the talent and potential of its citizens"?

Anyway, there's a common thread running through Pol Pot, Lenin, and other practitioners of political violence: they all had higher educations but came from countries in which most people had no education at all. It's the divide between elite and mass that creates that kind of nationalist or revolutionary despair, the "What Is To Be Done?" attitude.

Posted by brooksfoe | September 25, 2007 4:57 PM

I echo what brooksfoe and the others said, re the education of the population in proportion to the education of the leaders being the concern.

plus:
The methodology of those who argue against this point is a bit off: pointing to Nazi Germany and saying the populace was educated so case closed, is [assuming the facts are correct] wrongheaded, mainly because if you are going to use history as your proxy for a controlled lab experiment, you have to examine every society with an educated population vs. an those with an uneducated population [in cases with and without educated leadership], and draw conclusions from there.

My own picked cherry from the history grab bag would be the Czech Republic, which did have an educated population, one who did not give up hope during the dark times, but kept fighting underground, and this made all the difference. While overwhelming military force [of the Soviets in their case] wins in the short term, education is something that pays off in the long haul.

And since everyone throwing out on this topic has had the benefit of education, and of living in a relatively educated society, he should not be so quick to take that for granted.

Posted by Phoebe | September 25, 2007 5:34 PM

" ... quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion."

This is only surprising if you don't understand religion. Studying religion in a scholarly way creates doubt. None of the major monotheisms stand up as literal truth under scholarly study. So it's actually quite reasonable that the people most likely to be seduced into doing crazy things for their religion are the ones who have never studied its sources and the roots of its texts.

Posted by Evan | September 25, 2007 8:41 PM

Having intended to be a terrorist myself, I can inform you that education has nothing to do with becoming a terrorist.

A person becomes a terrorist because he's fed up with his situation and the environment around him - and he can't see any other way to deal with the situation because strike back.

Now, the smarter you are, and more importantly, the WISER you are, the more likely you are to find better ways to deal with that disaffection than becoming a terrorist - which is basically deciding to commit suicide.

But it has nothing to do with your education in general.

BTW, the nitwit who thinks "geeks become libertarians become terrorists" is just clueless. The "humanities" are mostly crap. Very little about the way the "real world" works is to be found there. What IS found there is nonsense used to justify imposing violent solutions on everyone else. ALL of your politicians come from the "humanities" - very few scientists or technicians become politicians.

When you study how the "real world" works, you discover that most of the way the SOCIAL world works is bullshit. THAT is what turns you into a terrorist - when you discover that "society" is a lie, that "democracy" is a lie, that the state is a lie, that religion is a lie, that there isn't a hell of a lot that isn't a lie. And that you're getting screwed by those lies to the point that you really can't do much about it.

That's when people become terrorists.

The more educated you are, the more you can reason, the more you can question the "received wisdom", the more likely you are to come up against the Establishment. And that will cost you. If it costs you enough - and that is an attitude and resource issue, not an education issue - you become a terrorist. If you don't have the confidence, and the physical, mental and economic resources, to deal with the situation, you end up basically "giving up" and resorting to the last ditch methodology of terrorism.

But as I said, there are better ways. That much I learned from having the time to think during eight years in the Federal pen.

That said, increased education over time SHOULD lead to the elimination of religion and the state - which in turn would lead to the elimination of terrorism. But nobody is in favor of eliminating religion and the state - which is why the US educational system sucks rocks.

Which is why thirty percent or more of the US population is so stupid as to support Bush regardless of what he does.

Give me a bunch of failed Islamic terrorist engineers over those right wing nitwits any day.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | September 25, 2007 11:05 PM

"People with a background in the hard sciences often seem to be particularly vulnerable to simplistic, reductionist ideologies." -Josh G.

Take Dr. Octopus for example...

Come on. Have you ever actually met a real working scientist? I would say that you have accurately analysed the demographic of characters appearing on the Sci-Fi channel. Los Alamos was filled with scientists fleeing simplistic, reductionist ideologies.

Posted by Njorl | September 26, 2007 10:37 AM