bombing Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam, Americans split 50-50 as to
whether we should bomb these targets. After the bombing began, 85 percent
favored the bombing while only 15 percent opposed. The sudden shift was the
result, not the cause, of the government’s decision to bomb. The same
allegiance and socialization processes operated again when policy changed in
the opposite direction. In 1968, war sentiment was waning; but 51 percent of
Americans opposed a bombing halt, partly because the United States was still
bombing North Vietnam. A month later, after President Johnson announced a
bombing halt, 71 percent favored the halt. Thus, 23 percent of our citizens
changed their minds within a month, mirroring the shift in government policy.
This swaying of thought by policy affects attitudes on issues ranging from our
space program to environmental policy and shows the so-called “silent
majority” to be an unthinking majority as well. Educated people are
overrepresented among these straws in the wind.^19
We like to think of education as a mix of thoughtful learning processes.
Allegiance and socialization, however, are intrinsic to the role of schooling in
our society or any hierarchical society. Socialist leaders such as Fidel Castro
and Mao Tse-tung vastly extended schooling in Cuba and China in part because
they knew that an educated people is a socialized populace and a bulwark of
allegiance. Education works the same way here: it encourages students not to
think about society but merely to trust that it is good. To the degree that
American history in particular is celebratory, it offers no way to understand
any problem—such as the Vietnam War, poverty, inequality, international haves
and have-nots, environmental degradation, or changing sex roles—that has
historical roots. Therefore, we might expect that the more traditional schooling
in history that Americans have, the less they will understand Vietnam or any
other historically based problem. This is why educated people were more
hawkish on the Vietnam War.
Some people have suggested that the Vietnam War was idiosyncratic. For six
long years, they point out, it was a Republican war, and Republicans are on
average more educated than Democrats; that is why more educated Americans
were hawks. Such thinking founders on several grounds. First, more than any
other war in our history, Vietnam was a bipartisan war. John Kennedy,
Democrat, sent in the first soldiers; Lyndon Johnson, Democrat, sent in the
most. Second, more-educated Americans were pro-war when those
Democratic administrations waged it, compared to less-educated Americans.