Education Quote by Thabo Mbeki

Mbeki is doing two things at once here: questioning the neutrality of expertise and insulating himself against the charge of being anti-science. The line doesn’t attack “science” outright; it attacks the sociology of science. By framing scientific consensus as the product of “one school of thought,” he shifts the argument from evidence to exposure, from what’s true to who gets to be considered educated. It’s a strategic reframing with high political payoff: if the majority holds a view because they’ve been trained into it, dissent can pose as independent thinking rather than denial.

The subtext is populist but not crude. “Educated into” implies conformity as an outcome of institutions, not individual bad faith. “Overwhelming majority” is admitted, then deflated: consensus becomes suspicious precisely because it’s large. That inversion is rhetorically potent in politics, where majorities can be painted as herds and minorities as brave. It also echoes postcolonial skepticism about Western knowledge systems: which schools, whose curricula, whose gatekeepers?

The context matters because Mbeki’s public legacy is inseparable from South Africa’s AIDS crisis and his administration’s flirtation with AIDS denialism. Read through that lens, the quote works less as a principled critique of paradigm lock-in and more as a preemptive alibi for rejecting urgent medical guidance. It borrows the language of intellectual pluralism to justify policy hesitation, turning a real insight about institutional bias into a permission slip for catastrophic doubt.