There's confusion over the correlation of education vs ability to make good decisions -- I don't think the causal relationship between learning maths/logic and better decision making is established at all. It could be just that better "general intelligence" enables one to get good grades and also make better decisions, instead of the education having a meaningful impact.
And then there's an oversell of how useful some concepts are. I think it's fair to say that for me personally, I've had more success integrating into my life what I learned about constitutional law than linear algebra. Before this generative AI thing I don't think I've ever used applied any knowledge of linear algebra.
There's a trend of people over-estimating the usefulness of their subject. Mathematicians tend to think everyone else needs to know advanced math. Historians think everyone should learn history. Tech people here think everyone should be more technologically literate. Judges think everyone is supposed to know the law ("ignorantia juris non excusat").
In the end the body of knowledge out there is just too vast, life is too short, and it's actually a good thing that people learn different things, even at expense of being "illiterate" at some subjects. I think the "80-90%" who never integrated the stuff they were taught at school is evidence that they should have the option to learn something else instead of being forced to sit in classes that they don't feel like taking.
While in general I don't condone anti-intellectualism in the sense of being proud of being ignorant, I think to some extent it is a reaction against
forms of out-of-date intellectual-elitism, especially the kind that considers people who took a classical education as superior than those who have not. For example, knowing how to build a house is definitely more useful than knowing the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, but the house builder is presumably not looking down upon the history major for lack of house-building knowledge. But somehow there is (or at least was) a snobbishness among the educated class that did view the house builder as less "sophisticated". (Of course we all know history majors can end up worse off financially than blue collar workers now, but these days it's the STEM people who still somewhat maintain this elitist attitude and clinging onto century-old math curricula.)
And some people find it hard to accept that the classical education isn't as useful as they claim to be.
There's confusion over the correlation of education vs ability to make good decisions -- I don't think the causal relationship between learning maths/logic and better decision making is established at all. It could be just that better "general intelligence" enables one to get good grades and also make better decisions, instead of the education having a meaningful impact.
And then there's an oversell of how useful some concepts are. I think it's fair to say that for me personally, I've had more success integrating into my life what I learned about constitutional law than linear algebra. Before this generative AI thing I don't think I've ever used applied any knowledge of linear algebra.
There's a trend of people over-estimating the usefulness of their subject. Mathematicians tend to think everyone else needs to know advanced math. Historians think everyone should learn history. Tech people here think everyone should be more technologically literate. Judges think everyone is supposed to know the law ("ignorantia juris non excusat").
In the end the body of knowledge out there is just too vast, life is too short, and it's actually a good thing that people learn different things, even at expense of being "illiterate" at some subjects. I think the "80-90%" who never integrated the stuff they were taught at school is evidence that they should have the option to learn something else instead of being forced to sit in classes that they don't feel like taking.
While in general I don't condone anti-intellectualism in the sense of being proud of being ignorant, I think to some extent it is a reaction against forms of out-of-date intellectual-elitism, especially the kind that considers people who took a classical education as superior than those who have not. For example, knowing how to build a house is definitely more useful than knowing the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, but the house builder is presumably not looking down upon the history major for lack of house-building knowledge. But somehow there is (or at least was) a snobbishness among the educated class that did view the house builder as less "sophisticated". (Of course we all know history majors can end up worse off financially than blue collar workers now, but these days it's the STEM people who still somewhat maintain this elitist attitude and clinging onto century-old math curricula.)
And some people find it hard to accept that the classical education isn't as useful as they claim to be.