Educationism: The Hidden Bias We Often Ignore教育歧视：人们经常忽视的隐性偏见

A subtle form of discrimination exists towards those who are less educated and it divides society in a number of ways.

人们对受教育程度低的人群抱有隐性歧视，这种歧视以多种方式分化着社会。

The first time Lance Fusarelli set foot on a university campus， he felt surrounded by people who seemed to know more than him—about society， social graces and “everything that was different”.

兰斯·富萨雷利刚上大学时，他觉得自己周围人的知识面似乎都比他更广——他们对社会、社交礼仪以及所有“与众不同的事物”比他更为了解。

He attributes these differences to his upbringing. While he didn’t grow up poor， it was in a working-class town in a small rural area in Avella， Pennsylvania. He was the first in his family to go to university—his mother got pregnant and had to drop out of school， while his father went to work in a coal mine in his mid-teens. He lived in an environment where few stayed in education beyond high school.

他认为与同学的这些差距都是他所处的成长环境所致。他家算不上穷困，但住在宾州阿韦拉乡间的一座工薪阶层小镇上，他是在那里长大的。他是家中第一位大学生——母亲怀孕后不得不辍学，而父亲十五六岁时就开始在煤矿工作。他的生活环境里，周围没几个人有高中以上的学历。

It worked out well for him. Fusarelli is now highly educated and a professor and director of graduate programmes at North Carolina State University. Occasionally he’s reminded of how he felt in those early days， when a colleague innocently corrected his imperfect grammar. “He wasn’t being mean， we were good friends， he just grew up in a different environment，” he says.  “Sometimes I will not always talk like an academic. I tend to use more colourful language.”

即使是这样，他的生活还算顺利。富萨雷利现在已经接受过高等教育，并且是北卡罗来纳州立大学的教授和研究生项目主任。但偶然间的一次，一位同事无意中纠正了他的语法错误，这让他回想起了自己早年的感受。“他并不是针对我，我们是非常要好的朋友，只是他的成长环境和我不同。”他说：“我不总是用学术语言进行交谈，我更喜欢使用生动的语言。”

While Fusarelli has risen through the ranks of academia， his experiences have highlighted the social divide that can exist in education. For those who are less educated due to their disadvantaged background， they face a subtle but pervasive bias. A report in 2017 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology named the term “educationism”： educated people are implicitly biased against the less educated. And this has unfortunate， unintended consequences that often stem from the gap between the rich and poor.

虽然富萨雷利在学术界已经有所成就，但他的经历却揭示了教育中可能存在的社会分化。对于那些由于贫困而没有受到良好教育的人来说，他们面临着一种普遍的隐性歧视。《实验社会心理学杂志》2017年的某篇文章提出了“教育歧视”一词，并将其解释为：受过良好教育的人对受教育程度较低的人存在隐性偏见。这种偏见会无意中带来某些不好的后果，而这些后果往往源于贫富差距。

It’s a “societal level” issue that creates a significant divide， says Toon Kuppens of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands， part of the team who coined the term.

荷兰格罗宁根大学的图恩·库彭斯是提出该词的团队成员之一。他说，这是一个“社会层面”的问题，并且造成了严重的社会分化。

The idea that people are biased against the less educated is not a new one. In the 1980s the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called it the “racism of intelligence… of the dominant class”， which serves to justify their position in society. Bourdieu pointed to the fact that the education system was invented by the ruling classes， with middle-class knowledge and questions appearing in tests.

人们对受教育程度较低的人持有偏见，这并不是什么新鲜事儿。20世纪80年代，法国社会学家皮埃尔·布尔迪厄称之为“统治阶级的……智力种族主义”，这有助于证明统治阶级在社会中地位的正当性。布尔迪厄指出，教育制度是由统治阶级创建的，考试中也就出现了中产阶级的知识和考题。

Education also appears to divide society in many ways. Higher levels of educational attainment are linked to greater income， better health， improved well-being and elevated levels of employment. Educational status also reveals political divides. Those with lower qualifications were more likely to vote for Britain to leave the European Union， for example. One report even found that education level played a bigger role in the Brexit vote than age， sex or income.

教育似乎在许多方面都造成了社会分化。高水平教育往往与更可观的收入、更健康的身体、更高的幸福感和更高水平的就业存在关联。教育状况也能揭示政治分歧。例如，低学历人群更有可能投票支持英国退出欧盟。一份报告甚至发现，与年龄、性别或收入等其他因素相比，人们的受教育程度更能影响英国的脱欧公投。

To address this， Kuppens and colleagues set up several experiments to understand attitudes towards education. They asked subjects outright how positive and warm they felt about others， but they also asked indirectly by describing several individuals’ jobs and education background， which participants then had to evaluate positively or negatively.

为了弄清这个问题，库彭斯和同事们设计了几个实验来了解人们对教育的态度。他们既直接询问受试者是否认可和喜欢他人，也通过描述他人的工作和教育背景进行间接询问，然后让受试者给出或好或坏的评价。

The results were clear—individuals who attained higher levels of education were liked more， both by high and lower-educated subjects. Participants who were more highly educated were clearly not “inherently more tolerant” than the lower-educated， as is commonly believed， says Kuppens.

实验结果显而易见：无论是高学历人群还是低学历人群都更喜欢受教育程度更高的人。库彭斯表示，受教育程度较高的参与者显然并不像人们普遍认为的那样，比受教育程度较低的参与者“天生更宽容”。

What’s more， he says that one of the reasons the bias exists is that education level is somehow perceived to be something people can control. “We are evaluating people—giving them negative attitudes—even though we know that in reality they cannot be blamed for their low education.”

此外，他说，这种偏见存在的原因之一是，教育水平不知怎么被视作可以人为掌控的。“尽管我们知道学历低不是他们的错，但我们仍对他人作出评价，并对他们持否定态度。”

The reason people cannot be blamed for low levels of education is due to its link to poverty. Those from poor backgrounds quickly fall behind their classmates at school and fewer teens from disadvantaged backgrounds go to university.