At 02:24 PM 8/16/99 -0400, Yoshie wrote: >suppose you are indulging yourself in the same imaginary solution by your >reference to the "lit-crit crowd," who presumably are the only denizens of >academe, unlike, say, social scientists who have nothing to do with the >"shadow of ivory towers." Ah, not at all - they are all members of the schmoozing/scribbling class, paper pushers, symbol manipulators, intellectual commodity producers if you will. The idea here is that the so-called "education" can brainwash people much more effectively than anythying else, inculcate them with the culture of the scipture and make immune to the concerns of the real world. Working class, by contrast, lacking exposure to such indoctrination is more open to the conerns of the real world, even though it does express those concerns in the savvy way found among symbol manipulators. This, btw, is not meant to dismiss the importance of education and knowledge but to say that today's academic institutions are perhaps 75% about symbol manipulation (underwriting credentials, producing spin, manufacturing intellectual commodity) and 25% about learning and producing knowledge. wojtek
