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"In fact a person would be labelled "elitist" to dare suggest anything else -- e.g. that universities are not just vocational schools for getting the skills for one's future job, or that technology should not just be about what Joe Public is capable of mastering, but about advancing Joe and Jane public." I've run into this very thing. The ironic thing about it is advocating for literacy, and understanding the abstract inventions of our civilization is the antithesis of elitism, because think about what would take place in a society where nobody who has the ability to influence events knows these things; where people do not know how to create their own analysis of events, to argue well, or to invent new social structures that benefit communities; to be active agents in negotiating their society's political destiny, keeping in mind the invented conceptual "guardrails" that maintain things like rule through law, and equal rights. In a society like that, elitism is all you have! Where the thought-inventions of our modern civilization are maintained, there is more possibility for creating an egalitarian society, in certain contexts, more power-sharing, and I think the evidence suggests more social progress. This doesn't get enough credit these days, but I think the historical evidence suggests certain forms of religion have helped promote some of these civilizational inventions as virtues, on a widespread basis, supporting the secular education that spread them. My experience has been that the reason people may put the label "elitist" on it is that learning these ideas is hard, and everybody knows that. So, there's been an understood implication that only a small number of people will be able to know most of them, and if most of the attention is devoted to inculcating these inventions in a relatively small number of people, then that will create an elite who will use their skills to the disadvantage of everyone else, who did not receive this education. What these people prefer to use instead is a lowest-common-denominator notion of egalitarianism, which doesn't promote egalitarian virtues in the long run, because it attenuates the possibility of maintaining a society where people can enact them. If we forget the hard stuff, because it's hard, we won't get the benefits they offer, over time. We will revert to a pre-modern state, because all the power to maintain our civilization is in these ideas. Keeping them as conventions/traditions is not good enough, because as we see, conventions get challenged via. a pragmatic, anti-tradition impulse with each new generation. |
And, in the end, very few get really good (I think I saw somewhere that there are only about 70,000 professional athletes in the US -- vs e.g. about 900,000 PhDs in the sciences, math, engineering and medicine.)
Two ideas about this are that (a) these are activities in which the basic act can be seen clearly from the first, and (b) are already part of the larger culture. There are levels that can be seen to be inclusive starting with modest skills (cooking is another such).
Music is interesting to look at. If the music is simple, we find the singing of songs with lyrics vastly more popular than instrumentals on the pop charts. But we also find "guitar gods" at the next and still high level of popularity. As the music gets more complex and requires more learning to be able to hear what is going on, the popularity drops off (and this has happened in many pop genres over the last 100 years or so). A lot of pop culture (I think) comes from teenagers wanting their place in the sun, and quickly. Finding a genre that's doable and can be a proclamation of identity -- akin to trying to be distinctive with clothing or hair cuts -- can be much easier than tackling a developed skill.
I think a very large problem for the learning of both science and math is just how invisible are their processes, especially in schools. The wonderful PSSC physics curriculum from the 50s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Science_Study_Committ...) bridged that gap with many short films showing scientists doing their thing on topics and using methods that were completely understandable right from the first minutes. This made quite a difference to many high school students.
I think I said somewhere in the blather of the interview that the easiest way to deal with the problems of teaching reading is to revert back to an oral society, especially if schools increasingly give in to what students expect from their weak uses of media. A talk I gave some years ago showed an alternating title line: between "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" and "The easiest way to predict the future is to prevent it". The latter is more and more popular these days.