Education is the new political faultline
In many countries, it is now education and not social class that most accurately predicts how people will vote in elections.
The longer someone spends in school or university and the more qualifications they gain, the more likely they are to back so-called ‘progressive’ causes and to vote for globalist, technocratic parties. Those who leave school with few qualifications, on the other hand, are more likely to vote for populist and nationalist parties.
This gap became apparent with the UK’s 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union. Almost three quarters of university graduates voted to Remain in the EU, while only one quarter voted to Leave. But among those with no qualifications, 65 per cent voted to Leave compared to 35 per cent who backed Remain. In Australia’s 2023 Indigenous Voice referendum, areas with higher proportions of graduates were more likely to vote ‘yes’ in the referendum. In the US, exit polls conducted after the 2024 Presidential election suggested that almost two-thirds of adults who had not attended college backed Donald Trump whereas roughly the same proportion of those with an advanced degree voted for Kamala Harris. In Hungary, support for Fidesz is highest among those with least formal education. Everywhere, it seems, populist parties are being backed by voters with low level educational qualifications whereas university graduates turn out for left-leaning, establishment parties.
Scientists would have us believe that the link between educational success and voting intentions lies in our genes. One study claims to have found the ‘strongest causal inference to date of intelligence directly affecting political beliefs’ and that ‘being genetically predisposed to be smarter causes left-wing beliefs’. But such claims ignore the fact that what counts as ‘left-wing’ changes more quickly than the human genome. Being pro-free speech was once considered a liberal position; now, in the eyes of some campaigners, it is considered to be an authoritarian stance that takes no account of power differentials or hurt feelings. To uncover why graduates are more likely to back progressive causes and globalist parties, we need to ask what educational success signifies today and what exactly qualifications measure.
Across much of the west, education has become politicised. Schools have introduced new subjects such as Citizenship and Sexuality Education with the sole aim of changing children’s attitudes and values, while traditional academic subjects, like history and literature, have been ‘decolonised’ so as to alienate children from their national cultural inheritance. Some teachers go so far as to encourage students to engage in activities such as ‘fasting for Gaza’.
Schooling involves children leaving the private sphere of the home and entering the public realm of the classroom; as such, schools have always been intrinsically concerned not just with education - that is, the transmission of knowledge and culture - but with socialization. Discipline, for example, is important so that all children can learn. When schools abandon distinctly educational goals, socialization becomes an end in itself; a vast project encompassing a child’s moral, spiritual, emotional, physical and behavioural development.
When schools teach children about relationships, diet, protecting the environment and the meaning of gender, they are not transmitting knowledge but imposing values and enforcing behavioural norms. Children who come from families with values that align with the expectations of school, most likely middle-class children, will find it easy to adapt to the school environment. Their habits, beliefs and ways of behaving are affirmed by teachers in the classroom forming a virtuous feedback loop. Their ability to demonstrate the ‘correct’ response to a wide range of political issues - such as the treatment of migrants, the need to recognise a person’s gender identity or the importance of recycling - help them ‘fit in’ and feel as if educational success is within their grasp.
Meanwhile, children from families and communities that do not share the values promoted within school, most likely more working class children, find the socialization process more brutal. Not only must they take on board new attitudes and values, they must also distance themselves from those of their home environment. They are subjected not so much to socialization as re-socialization: they not only have to learn new ways of thinking and behaving but, in the process, become increasingly alienated from their own family and community. When schools no longer seek either to transmit the legacy of the past or to introduce children to their intellectual birthright, they consign pupils to a perpetual Year Zero. This leaves teachers free to induct children into a new political outlook.
Crucially, what’s expected of pupils in response to such politicized schooling is not critical analysis but conformity. Children are not expected to critique the idea of gender they are taught in Sexuality Education classes or the importance of ‘thinking globally’ that they learn in Citizenship. Instead, they must demonstrate having accepted these values. Successful students are rewarded with praise, good grades and exam certificates. The most successful of all get to continue their education at university.
In the context of a politicized education system, qualifications represent something different. They no longer simply recognise academic attainment or raw intelligence, they also represent an ability to espouse woke values or, at very least, to conform with such demands. In this way, rather than genetic measures of intelligence causing people to become left-wing, it is time spent in the classroom that engenders support for woke ideas.
There are, however, signs that no matter how far schools and universities go down the path of woke indoctrination, young people themselves are not buying it. Indeed, the inculcation of elite, ‘progressive’ values is, in some quarters, generating significant resistance among the young. Recent elections and opinion polls suggest that members of Generation Z, people born between 1997 and 2012, appear to be diverging from slightly older voters in their views and becoming increasingly conservative. When it comes to both education and politics, there is still everything to play for.
This was originally published at Corvinak, the knowledge base of Mathias Corvinus Collegium, where I am currently a Visiting Fellow: https://corvinak.hu/en/velemeny/2025/01/28/growing-up-woke-education-is-the-new-political-faultline