Is America Anti-Intellectual?

[gretchen]

That's what this book that was published in 1964 says:
http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectual ... roduct_top

 

[j.]

The whole world is stupid.

 

[4peatssake]

The whole world is stupid.

 

[pboy]

Yea moreso than I'd like, but it's not people's fault...I think its the way the school system is so mechanized, rigid, and based more on memorization and standardization than uniqueness, self expression, self anyalyzing, and creativity. I think its more just suppressed self, and a lifestyle and society that supports suppressing self, rather than intellectualism actually being absent or deficient. When people are alone and amonst close friends or family they are quite intellectual, I think its just not openly shared or utilized much at all in America.

 

[j.]

Yea moreso than I'd like, but it's not people's fault...

I think it's partly due to eating PUFAs, too.

 

[gretchen]

Yea moreso than I'd like, but it's not people's fault...I think its the way the school system is so mechanized, rigid, and based more on memorization and standardization than uniqueness, self expression, self anyalyzing, and creativity. I think its more just suppressed self, and a lifestyle and society that supports suppressing self, rather than intellectualism actually being absent or deficient. When people are alone and amonst close friends or family they are quite intellectual, I think its just not openly shared or utilized much at all in America.

I think education is definitely a huge factor.

This book Inventing the Egghead: the Battle over Brainpower in America by Aaron Lecklinder says
It has to do with the devaluing of intellectuals:
http://www.thepointmag.com/2013/reviews ... -professor

In Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over Brainpower in American Culture, the cultural historian Aaron Lecklider explores how “Americans who were not part of the traditional intellectual class negotiated the complicated politics of intelligence within an accelerating mass culture.” Here he follows the Italian Marxist critic Antonio Gramsci, who theorized a distinction between “traditional” (bourgeois) and “organic” (working-class) intellectuals, as well as in the vein of British cultural historians Richard Hoggart (The Uses of Literacy) and Raymond Williams (The Long Revolution). Against the received idea, which he associates with historians like Richard Hofstadter and Christopher Lasch, that “the masses” have always been reflexively anti-intellectual, Lecklider argues that, throughout the twentieth century, intelligence—or “brainpower,” as he prefers to say—was in fact highly valued by working-class people in a variety of contexts.