Intellectualism Gives Education a Bad Name
Rightfully so, intellectual life has always been central to the idea of education. However, there exists in our country a populist strain that equates intellectual matters with elitism, particularly given the perceived elitism associated with what might be stereotypically regarded as the nation’s “top tier” academic universities and colleges. In some respects, the association between elitism and higher education is warranted. For many, practically speaking, the very function of higher education is to achieve some degree of insulation from common plight.
Nevertheless, considered in its purest and most romantic ideal, education, itself, is meant to endow us as citizens with greater understanding about the world. In so doing, education thereby is designed to empower us—at least ostensibly—with an ability to connect with more of the surround and the “common” people in it than with less and fewer.
If it seems that the two purposes of education—removal from common circumstances yet connection to common people—appear at odds with each other, that’s because, in reality, they are. In the age of inequality that is our present, nearly 70% of society lacks the minimum of a four-year bachelor’s degree. For those who reside within this majority, such is the state of educational attainment, which must, by conclusion, typify the “common” experience. Increasing access to higher education then, would, in effect, flip the portion so as to make, say, the attainment of a four-year bachelor’s degree the norm rather than the exception, thereby raising the common standard.
This is well, but even more foundational to the matter in question is consciousness, itself, and, more specifically, language as its mode for representation. Language—verbal and otherwise—is a primary mode by which we 1) represent and then 2) communicate meaning—and so, by extension, knowledge, and understanding. With regard to the first function of language—that of representation—the more language we acquire in support of meaning, the more complicated our understanding, which compels us to pursue yet more language, complicating our thinking still further. The learning loop, itself, is predicated on the reciprocity that exists between language and understanding, each serving as basis for the other’s evolution, promoting the ultimate and supreme goal—that of greater consciousness and intellectual growth via cultivation of the mind. The learning loop, thusly defined, is education at its core—is, in fact, education’s very machinery at work.
And yet, to honor language and its second function—that of communication—the language has to be honed and modified in such a way that, when deployed, it not only functions to represent the intended meaning, but also serves to communicate the intended meaning via the transmission from self to other in successful connection. Audience usually dictates how language is thusly deployed. It’s this question of intended audience and the influence such intention has over how language is deployed that lies at the heart of the contention between education and its perceived elitism.
While cultivation of the mind—and its intellect—goes to the very heart of education, intellectualism is regarded much more cynically. Referring back for a moment to how language works, as a mode of representation it functions on paradox. Language must signify meaning by limiting what that meaning can be, in effect conveying, in true binary fashion, how inside and outside each cannot exist without the other. To put it another way, whatever significations are included to constitute a set of accepted meanings necessarily come at the expense of excluding whole universes of other potential associations. The effects of the inside/outside binary on the learning loop are devastatingly profound since an increase in the complication of understanding is naturally attended by an impulse to pursue language that is representatively complicated and so potentially more exclusive in audience and, therefore, elitist in impact. When perceived in such a way, the intellectual dynamic simply inherent to education’s learning loop, cynically regarded in its intent, becomes an object of ridicule and, so, dismissingly charged with the mocking epithet “intellectualism.
Intellectualism has assumed a life of its own during the time in which we currently find ourselves—this age of unprecedented levels of inequality and, very much related to this, an age of “alternative facts.” With charges of intellectualism come rather dark suspicions, the conspiratorial belief in the power to manipulate facts in service of an agenda—political, social, economic, racial, national, etc.
In the name of effective communication, perhaps all of us ought to strive for more eloquence. More and more of it. Eloquence as I think of it is the following: complicated meaning, simply expressed—the gracefulness of a ballet dancer, for instance, and a pirouette made to look easy, but only through a lifetime of the most rigorous and complicated training; the same for a world-class athlete, the artist, and for that matter, anyone who engages his or her trade as an expression of craft.
