re: #126 Renaissance_Man

I guarantee that 95% of those who condemn ‘those intellectuals’ for lecturing from their ivory towers and their snobbery towards the common man cannot name five ‘intellectuals’ whose works they have ever read any part of.

In other words, this idea that ‘intellectuals’ have fostered resentment in the ‘common man’ through their sneering lectures is a ridiculous canard.

It’s the first stirring of the current hate cult - those liberals/intellectuals/elites out there, they hate you, they look down on you because they think you’re stupid. Therefore you must hate everything they stand for. Sure, you haven’t read anything of theirs, but that’s okay, we’ll tell you what they stand for.

I agree that the gross generalization about “intellectuals” is bullshit.

That said, there is something the lies at the root of the generalization.

In some fields, I have seen a divide between the theoreticians and the practitioners - take teaching as one example. There are many teachers who have real-world experience but who really lack in a basic understanding of educational and developmental psychology. On the other hand, you can find many academics in the field of education whose theoretical framework is undermined by a lack of real-world classroom experience.

Another, similar example of a similar phenomena - perhaps less divisive, would be when you have MBA consultants come in to a business and try to implement a boilerplate - based on theories of business management - but who lack a contextualized understanding of the environment they’re trying to apply their theories to. On the other hand, you have people in business who don’t have basic knowledge about what scientific study of, say, what motivates workers, or the cost-effectiveness of certain business practices, and make the same mistakes over and over again as a result of not having a theoretical background in their field.