part 2 in the series of feels: 4 am feels

I apologize in advance for perhaps being incoherent. It is very early in the morning.

Cristina touched on this in her blog post, but I wanted to illuminate another aspect of the quotation that she references:

“In a democracy, people tend to get what they demand, and more crucially, do not typically get what they do not demand” (156).

My question is: what happens when people do not know what they should/would demand?

At first glance, the idea that people will not know what is best for them seems paternalistic. I am not arguing, however, that the government or certain groups of people know better than them in virtue of their position in society, but rather that they might know better in virtue of their level of education. Furthermore, if citizens did not possess the necessary tools (literacy, a basic level of education), could this not undermine their ability to engage in a “fuller [emphasis mine] practice of democracy” (154)?

If we think about the issues that Americans currently grapple with vs. the ideas we used to grapple with, it seems that there has been a positive progression of ideas in some domains. For one, most people think that slavery and segregation are both morally reprehensible. Why have our values changed and why do we now value both freedom and equal freedom? People fought hard to fight for these rights. Once protections were codified into law, certainly the general ethos of institutions changed and thus society changed. In addition to this, however, I think that education plays a very significant role in the evolution of our values (from generation to generation and within an individual’s lifetime) and our increased emphasis on equality.

What about the statistics that show that those who receive college degrees are more likely to be Democrats? If there is some causal relation and if education could change our values and beliefs, how can there be genuine political participation in a society with vast inequalities of educational levels of achievement? What would Sen think? How would we go about improving educational capabilities without infringing on political capabilities in a society that does not value education?