I'm kinda curious if y'all have opinions even tangential to this. It seems like there used to be pride in being an autodidact, while now any education outside of the standard channels is considered illegitimate or "posing."
I'm kinda curious if y'all have opinions even tangential to this. It seems like there used to be pride in being an autodidact, while now any education outside of the standard channels is considered illegitimate or "posing."
From 1922:
Point absolutely taken that there was always an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism. I think it's made a big resurgence and has been amplified in the FOX era though, after many decades of venerating college education generally.
College education was only venerated because it was sold to people as a way to make more money. There's a paragraph right before that where Babbit talks about how much time is wasted at good old State U on subjects that don't teach a fella how to sell and hustle and be Efficient. The anti-intellectualism has always been a part of it. Being an effete intellectual is for the musty old aristocracy. The Good Productive bourgeoisie appreciates that stuff, within reason, but a fella who spends all day reading or looking at art simply won't have time to get to Business.
Sure, it was a way to make money, but there was also a recognition of the value of a broad education, with an element of the humanities, to the individual and wider society, even if only so that your failson could get a wife suited to his station. That's gone imo, parents who would have previously been "my daughter the scientist" or "my daughter the doctor", with some pretense towards benefiting society, now prefer their children to be PMC accounting technicians getting theirs.
The Babbits of the 1920s absolutely preferred to see their kid marry a good, industrious type rather than a charity do-gooder.
The true aristocraticly-minded elite you're thinking of are fairly rare. Most lesser-boug and petit-boug types have very few pretense towards "society" outside of giving to their church, backing the blue, and either organizations like the American Legion or the Elks, or more recently, showing off cultural signifiers (usually conservative, sometimes liberal).
Ok, if we're going with the frame of a 1920s context, a doctor/scientist in those times would absolutely have been a "good, industrious type" looking for status and money, with the added cachet of being educated. Education being something to venerate and admire. That cachet is gone imo. Willful ignorance among high earners is a badge of honor.
I don't accept your characterizations in the second paragraph tbh. My impression is that there was a significant working and middle class cohort, from the 1920s, if you like, to the mid 90s, who viewed education as their children's way to respectability and agency. The parents might not have been educated themselves but they believed in it's value and liked the thought that they were contributing to society by producing educated children. That's gone imo. The major factor in this is the FOX media complex.
Doctors were widely considered quacks until the 50s/60s. "Scienctist" never had much cache unless they were inventors that made money. There was a brief time when being a scientist was pretigious in the 50s/60s, and that was mostly tied to the Space Race and the cold war.
Capitalists have never seen the value in things that don't directly make money. That's always been a feature of the bourgeoisie. I think a lot of people have mixed up conceptions and think that the mid-20th century was the norm whereas in reality, the modern day is much closer to what Capitalism always has been than the 50s through the 80s. The Fox media complex was the past was preachers, radio, etc.