“Intolerance is the first sign of inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility”. —Alexander Solzhenitsyn

I will come out of the closet here and admit that I get a weekly subscription from the “The Week” magazine which is a decidedly progressive publication. When I cam across this quote in the “Wit & Wisdom” column on the July 21st issue it got my attention.

72% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning Independents believe that colleges and universities have an overall positive effect on the country. But 58% of Republicans and Republican-leaning Independents feel these institutions have a negative effect. Republicans also hold a negative view of the media by an 85% to 10% margin — Pew Research Center

I pretty much align with the idea that intolerance is a sign of the lack of education. Education, at least personally, caused my horizons to greatly expand. It caused me to enter a world that I was not familiar with. It caused me to see things in a different light. Thinking, and maybe more importantly pondering things caused me to move outside of my own sphere into the broader world.

I don’t have any immediate statistics at hand to back up my belief but I kinda bet that many if not most of the Trump supporters are without much education beyond high school. They were never forced to think outside their current beliefs.  All they do is see a world that is foreign to them and they don’t like it. They wish for a world of the past that in reality never really existed.

Of course this difference between Democrats and Republicans is not a black/white issue. 40% of Republicans do thing that a college education is a good thing while 28% of Democrats think it isn’t. Just like everything else the world is shades of grey.

I want to close this post with the admission that some people go through college without really broadening their horizons. I also recognize that an education is not the only way to see a broader world.  Again, shades of grey….