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."
Same thing that happened to intellectualism. One there's significant pressure against it by growing monetization of anything and everything, the whole monopolization of education, then there's steps against having an educated and therefore 'dangerous' populace particularly in regards to literacy. There's no major financial incentive for your average person to be an intellectual or self-taught in any skill, there's also no social gain. Its not useful/cool to be smart on your own. People that know more things things can figure out are being exploited faster than those who don't (anyone with a brain eventually will, but they won't find a framework to put it to and instead blame the lizard people on Mars south pole), and if they read reasonbly, well about x1000 times more risk.
Arguably, with the pandemic and supply issues there is a growing incentive in say, knowing EE 101 to unbrick a ROM, knowing how to plant an efficient veg garden, or basic car repair for the more practical things that are on the border between working knowledge and education. I think the pride will eventually return, since I don't see things improving any time soon.
Thank you o7 this has given me some things to think about. I think the big question I've had is why isn't it good to be smart, at least in the sense of knowing useful things.
Being smart has always been about what you can do with it, even back to the evolutionary tree.
Seems like Euro settler-colonialism in the States has rejected intellectualism from inception and autodidacts were the exception, not the rule.
Also “official” education is propaganda in service of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and a focus of it is to legitimize itself while delegitimizing counter-narratives.
If you were interested in the social sciences, unless you use calipers on the regular, the right wing in the USA will label you as a liberal, as weak, as something to be fought against. Unless you grow up with a robust support network that encourages and protects against outsiders frustrating efforts into deep learning of the social sciences, most intellectual curiosity would be firmly bullied out of you.
The narrative being, only the elite should know enough about history and society to be able to talk about the good/bad of a society and which way to direct it. The rest of the rabble should go "learn to code" if they are "smart" or settle in to multiple part time jobs flipping burgers, rolling burritos, and stocking shelves in grocery stores if they aren't "smart".
I've never really seen this with the people i've worked with, outside of exceptions. Most people seem to pursue knowledge that interests them, especially if it doesn't have the initial hurdle of being full of "five-dollar words".
I guess the thing that struck me as odd is why do people not peruse their interests rigorously, and instead only have a passing interest in those things.
Lack of energy from (in my case) 50 to 60 hour work weeks, back to back, and no real way to apply interests unless they're skills based.
Reasons?
The squeezing of pay and conditions, the breaking and corruption of unions, such that people are too exausted for self improvement. After decades of this intellectualism has becomes a badge of privilege, something not equally available to the working class and something to resent.
The pushing of a corn syrup sugar diet so that people's focus and attention are subject to sugar rushes, and the inclination is towards a carb coma on the couch in the evenings.
The unimaginable right wing media complex pushing anti intellectual tropes, using military methods perfected in the colonies, taking advantage of an atomized society vulnerable to the most basic methods. It's a common talking point across right media for parents to say thet they actually regret sending their kids to colleges with those liberal ideas, and they are saying it IRL too.
It’s a common talking point across right media for parents to say thet they actually regret sending their kids to colleges with those liberal ideas, and they are saying it IRL too.
From 1922:
Babbitt attended to her: “Nonsense! Get just as much, studying at home. You don't think a fellow learns any more because he blows in his father's hard-earned money and sits around in Morris chairs in a swell Harvard dormitory with pictures and shields and table-covers and those doodads, do you? I tell you, I'm a college man—I KNOW! There is one objection you might make though. I certainly do protest against any effort to get a lot of fellows out of barber shops and factories into the professions. They're too crowded already, and what'll we do for workmen if all those fellows go and get educated?”
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.
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).
The Babbits of the 1920s absolutely preferred to see their kid marry a good, industrious type rather than a charity do-gooder
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.
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.
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.
To what end?
For its own sake? Well then it's a hobby and such people definitely still exist. I've known some very well-informed gig economy workers, e.g.
To better understand politics / get political? Americans are deeply propagandized and can barely even begin to understand the basics because of the funnel towards partisanship. Even the supposed independents think in partisan terms. This prevents a deeper dive; getting into politics means the political discourse is set by the media and politicians, not you.
As a form of entertainment? Well there's a saturation of that in non-intellectual form already. Enough for you to entertain yourself for literal decades without actually learning anything and you won't even notice.
To improve your job prospects? Well that continues to depend on credentials since a big chunk of on-the-job training has been outsourced to educational institutions, the financial and mental burden (and risk) placed on the worker. There is room for self-teaching and some people try and some of them succeed, but the more direct path is a credential of some kind. It's also inherently limited since it's about a trade.
Because you like to read / have a reading culture? Well there's an absolute glut of fiction to read and people do, but this only makes you aware of themes and context and how to write well. Deeper understanding requires non-fiction, which is generally led by that same political partisanship of American "politics", i.e. liberalism. You'll read some crap by some famous journalists with elite credentials because that's still what society values. You don't even have to particularly appreciate those credentials: you read what you're aware of and you're made aware of things by a corporate media that worships certain people with certain esteem.
And this is before we get to the fact that just doing normal living things like working, sleeping, commuting, eating, taking care of dependents, and doing chores/errands takes for fucking ever. It's also amplified by the breakdown of community relationships, what leftists call atomization. More and more, people relate to one another through media platforms rather than face-to-face among their neighbors. They essentially fend for themselves directly in a corporate media network rather than self-driven / discussion-driven pursuits.
tl;dr: I think it's mostly corporate media propaganda, particularly the most powerful element of propaganda: dictating the subject of discussion and the direction of conversation.
The only autodidact I know is Eliezer Yudkowsky and he turned out uhhhh not great
Ok so honest question, did he one day just decide that many worlds was the correct quantum interpretation just because he felt like it? Like does he actually understand anything about quantum physics?
With the vanishing of the gentleman as a social role and further diminishing of the female sphere, there was no pace were someone was supposed to be an intellectual anymore. This is the result of capitalism destroying social units and families for profit rather than for completeness.
No. The diminishing of the female sphere was referring to how the things which are feminine have been reduced from a range of activities to "dress pretty, feel emotions." Sexism is still bad, and they didn't get rid of the female sphere entirely because it is still profitable to push women into a box. That box has simply gotten smaller and more expensive. In a similar way, male roles in society got reduced from a handful to like one, the brutish working man. This is not to say that a working man is inherently brutish, but that that brutishness is what society expects from him. This is why white-color workers like to pretend to be working class very often online or in some mannerisms. Rather than try to remove the idea that everyone can play their own unique role in life, everyone has been shuffled into like 2 roles. You can see the problem.
Sort of. A lot of the "helpful" parts of the gender divide and associated roles have been removed, so we are left with the rawest, meanest ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman within this framework. This was brought to its apex in the 1950s, and more people are working outside the gender binary or not strictly obeying it, so it could be worse. It's a really complex idea and I am butchering it to make it fit into a comment chain, so it is entirely my fault if this doesn't make sense.
