Anti-intellectualism
Related: anti- - intellectualism
Definition
The New England Puritan writer John Cotton wrote in 1642 that "The more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee." In 1843, Bayard R. Hall wrote of frontier Indiana, that "(w)e always preferred an ignorant bad man to a talented one, and hence attempts were usually made to ruin the moral character of a smart candidate; since unhappily smartness and wickedness were supposed to be generally coupled, and incompetence and goodness."
Anti-intellectual folklore values the self-reliant and "self-made man," schooled by society and by experience, over the intellectual whose learning was acquired through books and formal study. --http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism [2004]
Anti-intellectualism is a term that in one sense describes a hostility towards, or mistrust of, intellectuals and intellectual pursuits. This may be expressed in various ways, such as an attack on the merits of science, education, or literature.
Anti-intellectuals seek to frame themselves as champions of the self-styled "ordinary people", and as advocates of egalitarianism against elitism, especially what they perceive as academic elitism. These critics argue from a perception that educated people form a social class by virtue of their education: that members of this social class tend to talk chiefly to one another, and as such are remote from other points of view, and that members of this social class tend to dominate political discourse about social and other issues.
Anti-intellectualism is also a term used to criticize an educational system's placing little emphasis on academic and intellectual accomplishment or a government's tendency to formulate policies without consultation with authoritative scholarly study on the issues in question. --http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism [Jun 2005]
see also: anti-