Bill.

You hit the nail on the head. They are not part of the “educated” class, whatever that means, because of their actual education but because of their adherence to certain beliefs which just happen to conflict with the beliefs of the majority of the great unwashed masses.

Have an Evil day

Posted by President_Friedman
2010-01-07 12:07:30

This is a conservative thought line I’d like to see cleaned up too, but it’s been around for a while. Even Ayn Rand sneers about the “stink of college” in Atlas Shrugged, but also has several of the heroes of the book yukking it up at PHU and proudly talking about their double majors.

Maybe a better distinction has to be made between education itself and the academic culture, which are two very different things. Getting a degree is great, but remaining immersed in academia for too long without the balance of real world experience tends to warp one’s world view.

Posted by Bill_Dalasio
2010-01-07 10:09:24

Mr. Dalasio – an excellent point. I hold a Bachelor’s degree, two Master’s degrees, a PhD and a JD, and yet I don’t consider myself part of the intellectual elite class. I don’t see myself in that group because I don’t share many (OK, most) of the social, economic, moral and political values they espouse at the drop of a hat, to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

Slightly related and old joke:

Q. How can you tell if someone you meet at a party has a degree from the University of Michigan?

A. Don’t worry, you won’t have to wonder for long – they’ll tell you all about it in excruciating detail within five minutes of meeting you.

Posted by President_Friedman
2010-01-07 12:31:59

Well put. I’m generally in disagreement with the conservative trend of roasting “intellecutals” and “elitists”…

No offense, Dr. Friedman, but you might want to check your assumptions there. Contrary to the popular trope, I really haven’t seen much in the way of evidence that conservatives really are inclined to have much of a problem with intellectualism. I think no small number of conservatives are very much inclined to put a value on the life of the mind. I think what many of us find distasteful is the presumption of many of the “educated class” self-defining as our intellectual superiors, simply based on their membership in this class. That so many members define themselves as the nation’s intelligentsia creates the impression that conservatives are “anti-intellectual”.

You know, Bill, I rarely tell anyone about all those degrees and I think of them even less frequently. While I enjoy learning, and I’m almost always engaged in either a formal or an informal learning process, I’ve never viewed all that education as anything more than the means to an end, which for me is to make money.

As a kid back in the ’50′s I suffered mightily from dyslexia. Of course, dyslexia was a little known condition back then and there were no efforts made to accommodate it. Every time it’s been measured, my full-scale IQ has been well over the national average, and so I was treated to what seemed like a lifetime of parents and teachers telling me (usually in a scolding manner after I’d massively screwed something up) “If you’d only work up to your potential…” As you might imagine, given that background, there was nothing about my academic achievements in the first 16 years of education that would suggest that I might be a good candidate for any post-graduate education.

It wasn’t until I re-entered academia as an adult that I learned that there are ways for people with dyslexia to cope with the demands of reading-intense environments like graduate school, and from there, the rest is history.

The one thing I am proud of about my degrees is that none of them are from diploma mills. They were all from accredited and respected universities and were obtained through old-fashioned hard work with no cut corners.