Saturday, 28 July 2012

The Country and the City

On Raymond Williams:

The anti-intellectualism of the vox populi in America in the beginning was simply the slowness which the undereducated could learn to measure up to the demands of universal suffrage. But the proliferation of massive mediums in the twentieth century complicated the appropriate education of the underclasses. 

When the MLA decided to ignore the new complexities of mass education (the spinoff of the NCTE before the Depression) marks the defection of the humanistic elite from the Jeffersonian allegation that a democracy could be no better than its public schools.

My indictment of the alienated humanist stems from my perception of my peers as they deployed their careers as near the Ivy ideal as possible. Williams and Hoggart confirmed my perception.

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