highly-educated peers

The benefits and necessity of an education, especially higher education, remain oversold for what they are: a transfer of wealth and a way to ensure class stratification.    And the massive ineptitude of professional economists, all of whom have degrees, many from elite schools, only proves the massive failure of an increasing systemization of so-called learning. Like vegetables without vitamins, our colleges are grinding out people on an industrial model and that is not what we need. It actually damages what people have going for them in the first place. If we have to have some kind of job-training from the top-down, it will have to preserve the native talents and abilities of people and not damage them. Schools played a far smaller role in the life of the community until recently. Now the system manufactures ignorance.

Dean Baker alludes to this when he points out that these well-educated experts have managed to wreck the economy and face no accountability.  From the article:

Of course Brooks is right. Working class men are ill-prepared to deal with the effects of incredible economic mismanagement that has made them its primary victims. It has been conscious policy of David Brooks and his peers to weaken welfare state supports, making income and well-being almost entirely dependent on employment. Now, because David Brooks' highly-educated peers are incompetent economic managers, millions of working class people (disproportionately men) are facing extended periods of unemployment. And, naturally Brooks sees their difficulty in dealing with this crisis as a failure of working class culture.

This blaming of people for their educational attainments is a strange view but no doubt it is ingrained in us at an early age.  If we can blame poor children for not making good grades, if we can blame the working class for not going to college, if we can accept that the problem is that we need more opportunities (to fail, to be ranked and filtered out: we need realities, not opportunities), then it is easy to blame the victims.  We learned it as children.

Indeed, the mass collectivization represented by modern public school systems is a threat to our national mental health and predisposes us to an authoritarian culture.  We learn to accept this authoritarian culture at an early age in schools. The factors that limited the impact of this mass molding of our psyches, positive social capital and plentiful work outside of the school system (from agricultural in the early 20th century to the computer industry in the last 50 years), these factors are greatly diminished or have turned to negatives.