What is causing anti-intellectualism in the US?

Wow! I spent a lot of time researching your info, Francis. Most of what I found had to do with projective tests involving creativity. The results are many and varied. You were right.

Hey, Ros. You never did define what you meant by intellectualism. If we're talking about IQ, that opens up another milieu. If we're talking about knowledge, again that is a different venue. Please clarify, buddy.

Time to beg the question, methinks

You'll be drummed out of the European corps, here, Boss. Many of the people here from Europe spend a great deal of time telling us how better informed Europeans are than Americans, how better educated they are, and about how they are better engaged in matters of diplomacy and public policy. I have never bought that story line, but it is certainly refreshing to see someone honestly point out that Europeans are really no different than Americans in this regard.

Part of the problem is that the people from Europe who post here are, mostly, articulate in English, which means they are well-educated, and they are mostly well-informed, because they would not otherwise know enough to engage in conversations about matters in the United States. But they can hardly be taken as representative of all Europeans. I wonder, for example, how many farmers from Europe, or how many automobile mechanics post here. I suspect we don't get a lot of European garbage collectors or nurses' aides posting here.

Which brings up another point. Americans have, for twenty years or more, agonized about how well their students fare against students from other nations. There is a disconnect, however, in the reality of the comparisons. In many nations, students are given tests throughout their academic careers which will steer them away from higher education and into trades if their test scores seem to indicate that that is what would best suit them. Additionally, the sort of academic performance tests which are used for such measurement are not administered to all students in foreign countries. The end result is similar to that which one sees when religious schools and other private schools in the United States are compared to public schools. Since public schools have to take all students, including "troubled" students from dysfunctional homes, and students with physical and/or mental disabilities, while private schools can select their student body, the public schools invariably appear to have a lower performance. The same thing can be seen in comparisons with with foreign elementary and secondary school test scores. American public schools which take anybody and everybody, and which test anybody and everybody, appear not to do as well as schools in foreign countries.

I suspect that in a matter such as "anti-intellectualism" we see the same thing. Foreign members who post here would often, probably usually, represent the better-educated and better-informed members of their societies, so we can't really use them as a standard to measure the degree of "anti-intellectualism" which might actually be present in their nations. When you add to that the undeniable fact that many foreigners come here to post their frustrations with and/or contempt for the United States and Americans, you end up with a very skewed and unreliable account of the true attitudes and knowledge of the citizens of nations other than the United States.

I think it is not correct to compare Europe with America, as America really is a continent just like Europe. At the most we can compare is our own European country with USA.
Honestly I have no idea about what people think, know or their level of education in most European countries. I just as the majority of Europeans don´t even speak the language of the majority of the other contries and we hardly ever meet people from these countries to sit down and have a real intellegent conversation. I have lots of contacts with people from Northen Europe and read on daily basis the newspapers on Internet from five countries.
Intersting is always letters to the editors as they show what people think more than one journalist telling his opinion.
Telling the US-Americans that we Europeans are so much better just show that that person knows very little about the good universities, colleges and level of education in USA.
Not mentioning in what nation it happens but I often have heard "USA has no cultur and no traditions". I get so mad when I hear things like that and have told people I find it an insult to our forefathers who left for USA taking with them their knowledge and traditions which are carried on from many different countries and continents.

Woooo - hoooooo!

USA! USA! USA!

If that's sarcasm, or an attempt thereat, you can bite me Brown.

Just because i am not willing to accept a contention of European superiority, or of consistent and predictable failure in the American education system doesn't mean either that i have blinders on, nor that i am a mindless super patriot who will hear not criticism of my native land.

Smartass.

You better be waving your "Country First" sign when you chant that ebrown.

Well that is - in a rather crude form - essentially what Richard Hofstadter wrote in his "Anti Intellectualism in American Life", a work that is a long time favorite of mostly liberal (in the American useage of that political label) folks who style themselves (but often not those who disagree with them) as "intellectuals".

However, intelligent, serious, experienced people know better.

Cyclo said:


Can you explain this? I know what an ivory tower is and how that terminology is commonly used, but I think there's a huge difference between being educated and inhabiting an ivory tower.
I think those two states of being don't necessarily have to have anything to do with each other.

Calm down Set... I am in agreement with everything you have said on this thread. I was just making a little joke.

((Can I still bite you though?))

Well . . . not in public, anyway . . .

Sorry. I've been busy. Haven't had much time to even follow my own thread here

By "intellectualism" I'm referring to the general perception in a portion of the population, that some things (careers, studies, knowledge etc) are "intellectual" to such a degree that they are inaccessible (or difficult) for most people to access without much effort and/or study.

Anti-Intellectualism is the tendency of some people to disdain anything which they don't understand, merely because they choose to label it as "intellectual".

Normally when someone derides something simply because they don't understand it, you respond by asking them to learn. But when a significant portion of the population begins to accept a lack of knowledge as the norm and the need to study as a suspicious past time, then I think you get a groundswell of anti-intellectualism. Which I believe we are seeing currently in the US (despite EBrown's opinion to the contrary).

Thanks, Ros. Now I understand the concept. My guess is that is possibly trendy right now to be "anti". U.S. schools(public or private) need to create a desire to learn.

When I was in Virginia, I saw a couple of my former students, and they ran up and gave me a big hug telling me that I was one of the best teachers that they had. Nothing is more rewarding than that.

psst, ros, I hope typos don't count in the scheme of intellectualism. Correction:

My guess is that IT is possibly trendy, etc.

Hi Letty, I was kinda hoping that society (rather than schools) could create the desire to learn. I feel like this is where the root of the problem resides.

I feel like something is happening in US society (or culture, I'm not sure the correct term) that is causing broad swaths of the population to either fear or mistrust the image they have of "intellectuals". And I would like to know what is causing this.

EBrown will probably say that the cause of this perceived growth in anti-intellectualism is my imagination (and he may be right, because I don't have any data to back up my feeling), but other people are talking about it, so I figured it would be a good topic for discussion.

Mornin' all.

ros, quite frankly I believe that the best part of a discussion lies in original thought. Why should we mirror the reflections of those who have gone before? Perhaps America is a wee bit frightened by intellectualism. Don't exactly know how we can remedy the situation, but , as individuals, do what we can to promote the idea of free thinking. We all love our country, and that is really not the point that you are trying to emphasize. Remember when everyone panicked when the Russians launched Sputnik? There was a mad rush to change everything to science. Thanks for the opportunity to look at both sides.

I don't know that Americans are anti-intellectual as that groups and individuals display "anti-intellectual" traits. As i mentioned in another thread in which Roswell was involved, religious fanatics are often opposed to education as it might well lead (and probably would) to the questioning of authority, especially bald statements from authority, and that is inimical to dogma. There can be a political aspect to this, too. As Americans became polarized between "left" and "right," it became at first politically expedient, and then politically correct to complain of the educational system, which was said to be in the hand of left-wing radicals who were filling children's heads with nonsense and doing everything but educate them. This attitude, which was partisan in origin, probably can be seen to have hardened into what might be called "anti-intellectualism." Certainly, the Kent State era was traumatic for the generations of university students and their parents. When that old hack Michener wrote his account of Kent State, he showed himself to be appallingly naive and gullible. But he employed an army of graduate students to do research for him, and one of the things which they consistently reported was a gulf of hostility between parents and their university age children. Literally hundreds of them reported that their parents had said to them that if they (the university aged children) had been involved in such "riots," they (the parents) would not have been upset at the thought of them being fired on by National Guardsmen.

Possibly, a trend of anti-intellectualism began then, and hardened through partisan political rectitude.

I think America has some uniquely American things make it both hard to change and stop its intellectual development.
Firstly : blind patriotism and complacency. Americans are significantly more patriotic than other cultures, any criticism of the country seems to be dismissed. People just assume that because it is American it can't be evil. Guantanamo bay. Fraudulent elections etc.
Wasn't Al Gore's problem that he appeared too smart? that is a terrible indictment. The fact that people could believe Obama was a muslim is frightening, and the belief that Iraq had anything to do with 9-11 equally so.
You can't get people to believe hogwash like that once they are educated. I accept that this isn't all Americans, but it isn't rare either.
I also think Americans have a system which encourages stupid people to believe they are smart. The opposite is true in Britain where intelligent people have their confidence destroyed. Certainly Americans are keen on spouting "facts" they have been told, with a very shallow understanding of the bigger picture. I have heard Americans say that they won the 2nd world war, which I believe is the plot to "Band of Brothers". America played a part, but so did Russia,Canada and the British Empire. It is at best a shallow interpretation.
Things like "shock jocks" are uniquely American. You have the grotesque spectacle of people being bullied masquerading as politics.
I feel there are two Americas. The Urban centres of New York and Calif. (plus the bit around the great lakes), and a much poorer swathe of Southern and Mid west states. I talk to a lot of American teachers, the position is much worse in say Oklahoma than it is in NY.
I believe there is in part a deliberately policy in this. Obama has been labelled a Marxist. Obama is not even left of centre by many indicators. I believe intelligent people will reject republicanism, ceratinly the simplistic foreign policy. I find the fact that the term "axis of evil" is not challenged scary too. I mean the countries are not connected politically,economically or culturally. Therefore the system has had a direct interest in maintaining a stupid populace.

Did someone tell you that, George?

I couldn't pass up this thread.

Here goes. Is it possible that the popular notion that Americans are anti-intellectuals is just a face saving canard for the benefit of the left side of that big bellcurve out there in the U.S.A.? Why make those that are not upwardly mobile be disheartened by their limitations? We will always need people to do certain jobs anyway? Anyone read Brave New World?

Also, rather than make Americans appear like an intellectual threat for the world, the belief may have been promulgated that many Americans are anti-intellectuals.

And, like I learned in a sociology class ages ago, we act the way we think others expect us to act. It might just be a nice canard to keep many people content with the popular culture. You know, bread and circuses.

I say this in context of the huge size, compared to Europe, of the 48 continental states. No easy task to manage so many people, I would guess. Better they not all be intellectuals, perhaps.

Well it is true that at least in our political history Americans have shown a distinctly pragmatic bent, avoiding repeated waves of fashionable political theories, energetically supported by fawning (mostly European) self-styled "intellectuals". From Marxism to the theories of race superiority and Fascism that were so fashionable in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, the American electorate clung to its vulgar but entirely practical concepts of individual freedom and local (as opposed to central and authoritarian) government.

Even our revolution in 1776 lacked the "intellectual" purity of the one that followed a little over a decade later in France - no Robspierre for us, no Reign of Terror. Only a self-proclaimed Western "intellectual" of the calibre of J.P. Sartre could rationalize the Soviet suppression of the popular revolution in Hungary in 1956. For almost four decades after Lenin's "Elimination of the Irreconcilables" in the USSR, this "intellectual" class (in Europe and to a degree here as well) continued to believe in the absurd notions of the creation of a "new Socialist man" through the brutality and oppression of Lenin and Stalin. No practical person with any real understanding of life and able to think for him/her self would fall for this nonsense. A bent brain is required - an "intellectual" - unable to see that the Emperor has no clothes.

Let us all hope that this anti intellectualism continues.