How educated should a proletariat be?

It depends on the goals of education. If you look a bit into Gramsci’s prison notebooks you will find that (formal) education is just an extension of capitalist power. Educated people only serve to reproduce the current power structures and to further the cultural hegemony of the ruling class. You can see that at play at all (most?) higher ed institutions where very little is done to lift off others versus personal advancement towards publications, grant funding, prizes.

Gramsci also has some ideas on how the education system can be rethought to benefit the masses. I’ll let you discover those ideas on your own :)

Not overthinking. It's an important question.

My view is that the proletariat must become as well educated as it is possible to be. Ideally, this should be a class conscious education. It doesn't have to be formal education but it could be. In the next stage of history, the proletariat will be the ruling class. It must be prepared and ready to rule.

There are problems with formal and informal education. With formal education, students have to rely more on having good teachers; and then they have to rely on the class conscious element in this cohort that is willing and able to deliver a class conscious curriculum.

With informal education, it's difficult to become an autodidact without some formal training. And either way, it's then unlikely that someone in this world would happen across Marxism without some guidance.

I agree, that both should result in being good at critical analysis. We're all gullible, unfortunately. It takes active and concerted effort not to be brainwashed by reactionary propaganda.

As for what to do? Teaching numeracy can't hurt. But mainly, teach and encourage people to read. Not just basic literacy but really to read and to interrogate texts. This is the crucial element for formal and informal education, to overcome either the lack of tuition or overbearing liberal tuition. I can talk further about techniques if you like.

https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

One should never stop investigating new things, but let's not pretend ideology is a matter of credentialed or non-credentialed education or sheer "intelligence" or "knowledge". These things factor in, but what people think they have the highest incentive to ascribe to is just as important. This is part of the reason that academics aren't more open-minded on average but just more adept at defending their positions (or seeing where some element isn't necessary and letting go of it to better defend the core).

That said, Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" is a cool book.

I think that one of the greatest accomplishments of the Soviet Union was its 99% literacy rate which to this day is unmatched in capitalist countries. In comparison, the literacy rate in the United States stands at 79% while 54% of the population read below the sixth-grade level.

Education is really important and my stance on the matter is that the proletariat should be as educated as they are willing to be and are possible of being. Universities should stop being only accessible to the privileged as they are in capitalist countries and instead be opened up to the masses. No longer should technical know-how and the classics be relegated to the rich. In my ideal world, if someone were interested in studying literature, mathematics, or the liberal arts... they should be no barriers (or at least minimal barriers) to doing so.

Education should also be stripped of its elite status to avoid the intellegensia from getting full of themselves (I'm a college graduate and have experienced this form of elitism first-hand). This education (primary, secondary, tertiary, trade...) should also help reinforce communist values in contrast to our current education system which reinforces capitalist values. We should also avoid elevating STEM over everything else.

That being said, there should obviously be some sort of censorship and commentary over certain kinds of subversive works. Some works are inherently reactionary and pose no benefits to the revolution and as such should be discarded. Works such as Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" should only be printed with commentary attached while others such Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf" should be forgotten in history. The specifics of how expansive this censorship should be will best be left to someone smarter than me.

I think there might be a correlation with higher education and internalizing doctrinal assumptions about capitalism. At least in the United States. But it really just depends on what you mean. You're talking about formal education versus just learning about class consciousness throats independent study or life experience etc...

The latter is extremely important. The former can be useful but if anything I think it will funnel more people into further accepting the deeply ingrained ideological assumptions of the elite classes.

People do seem to inherently understand that the game is rigged but they have been conditioned in a million ways to either do nothing about it or to blame the wrong people. It does require some pretty serious deconstruction to try to avoid internalizing this.

I would suggest looking into the several “going to the people” movements prior to the Russian revolution. The educated class conscious marxists went to the rural areas and tried to educate them about the goals and benefits of communism for the workers, but it ultimately didn’t work very well. This, in part, is what lead to the idea of a vanguard.

Education is a difficult thing to accomplish.