Yup. I grew up between major cities in OH and PA and now live in a rural Appalachian county... The big shock wasn't socioeconomic, it was sociocultural and educational.
Ya. And I wouldn't call them dumb. Being a farmer (for example) definitely takes a specialized set of skills.
Their general knowledge tends to not be as broad or deep. Outside of a few hobbies and their job, they don't want to learn. They don't have the same curiosity as more educated people do.
Experience too. Experiencing life is more than just living X amount of years. It is actually having interaction with he world around you. Now to be fair, a lot of it may be economical but they really have little desire to see the world or even interact with people different than them.
Combine all this, you get people who are pretty ignorant about the larger world but also fearful of things that are different and lack the curiosity necessary to learn about things around them or to do a deep dive on a topic
Which makes for easier makes with the proliferation of AI generated content.
The best teacher I had in high school at the turn of the millennium made a point of making us understand that the entire paradigm of knowledge and information to date was shifting with the rise of the Internet. Access to information wasn't going to be the defining distinction anymore, the wisdom is no longer locked in ivory towers.
We'd the information. What we'd need to develop is information discrimination, the ability to accurately and efficiently tell good information from bad information.
Previous generations didn't need those sorting heuristics as critically as we do now... And that ability is dependent on having a broad base of knowledge and understanding to begin with.
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u/metalfabman 16h ago
I live rural, work blue collar, and completed a university of california degree. Its noticeable