They have been like this forever. I remember being slated to go into college prep, and I remember snide comments from adults. From the guy driving the bus, for Pete’s sake. It increased as I took the PSAT and SAT, was accepted to a university, and was getting ready to head out to university. It wasn’t like I was the only kid heading off to university, but people, again, including adults who should be encouraging all kids to better themselves, but they sure acted like it was some kind of freak occurrence.
Things like “college boy”, and so on make it clear that they thought you thought you were better than them (often confused by using terms like “elitist” even though my family was not even close to counting as “elitist” by the normal definition of that term, and in my view, “elitist” doesn’t mean people interested in education, it means the scandalously rich).
I’ve seen people lambaste this kind of attitude about inner cities (read - among Blacks) but I often don’t see too many talk about how this bucket-of-crabs mentality is pervasive in white rural ares. I cannot speak for Black inner city life, I didn’t grow up there.
Yep, your post reminded me of something Isaac Asimov wrote in 1980,
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
They have been like this forever. I remember being slated to go into college prep, and I remember snide comments from adults. From the guy driving the bus, for Pete’s sake. It increased as I took the PSAT and SAT, was accepted to a university, and was getting ready to head out to university. It wasn’t like I was the only kid heading off to university, but people, again, including adults who should be encouraging all kids to better themselves, but they sure acted like it was some kind of freak occurrence.
Things like “college boy”, and so on make it clear that they thought you thought you were better than them (often confused by using terms like “elitist” even though my family was not even close to counting as “elitist” by the normal definition of that term, and in my view, “elitist” doesn’t mean people interested in education, it means the scandalously rich).
I’ve seen people lambaste this kind of attitude about inner cities (read - among Blacks) but I often don’t see too many talk about how this bucket-of-crabs mentality is pervasive in white rural ares. I cannot speak for Black inner city life, I didn’t grow up there.
Yep, your post reminded me of something Isaac Asimov wrote in 1980,