Reaping the Wind

Hand-wringing About American Culture - Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge? - New York Times: "But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way."

It is just what the school system is supposed to do. A lot of popular scifi is along the lines of "There are things Man is not supposed to meddle with." Frankenstein is a classic example but when you look at the news you see the same attitude.

Anti-rationalism is called by another name: multiculturalism. Or at the very least is presented the same way, so people easily fall into that pattern of thought.

Who are most reviled in schools? the nerds, the geeks, the smart ones. After years of emotional torture in primary schools they go to college and are with their own kind in the sciences and engineering fields. They graduate and get a job where they end up under the thumb of the same kind of bully they thought they had escaped and are soon laid-off and the whole thing starts all over again.

I know lots of people who have left the "Smart" fields because it wasn't worth the effort to stay there.

There are a lot of things wrong and we need to find a better way.