Knowledge of the past is more than "booksmarts".

Knowledge of the past is useful knowledge just like knowing how to change one's own oil is useful knowledge.

Just because a lot of academics are completely full of shit doesn't mean that people who know more than we do are full of shit.

There's a heckuva lot of useful knowledge in books. I don't give a shit if people can tell me the dates of the French Revolution. But you can learn a helluva lot about today's world and its possibilities for good and for evil by looking carefully at the experience of the French Revolution.

And that's the case regardless of how many dumb shits there are with PhDs who we've put in charge of "teaching" the French Revolution.

When I say that the Brits have better historical knowledge of us than we have of them, I mean they have more valuable knowledge. And "they" isn't just academic "experts" at Oxbridge. They is the man sitting next to you in a Man United shirt at the pub.

If people want to talk about the worthlessness of what is taught in schools, feel free. I doubt anyone here thinks less of the academic track record since, say, 1900, than I do.

But that doesn't make the knowledge in the books unimportant. It just means we've been letting other people read too much for us.

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I hope that that post wasn't directed at me Wade. I agree, especially history is important. If you don't know the past, you can't change the future.

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Nah, Finland. I was just ranting. :)

Been doing that a lot lately, it seems. It's that part of the semester when I go into sleep-deprived-and-become-a-pain-in-everyone's-ass mode.

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Wade - You do bring up a good point.

For the record, I'm not one bit anti-intellectual. I actually consider myself intellectual. I'm an educated man, and continue my education on a daily basis.

However, the point I was making is knowledge vs application. Whereas the average American may be dumb, why is it that we invent pretty much EVERYTHING? (Well, us and the Japanese). Why is it that we win pretty much every single Nobel Prize every single year?

Our application of knowledge does circles around everyone else, including all of Europe which has double our population, or all of Asia which has what? 10 times our population?

The more people outside of America knock America, the more defensive I get. Yes, we make really bad political errors. We get involved in stupid wars. Et cetera. But I'm talking applicable knowledge only and the stats prove me right. America does circles around everyone else.

From experience, I've found the worst culprits to be the English. My personal thoughts is that they have a masculinity crisis due to the fact that as a nation, they are has beens and that has given them an inferiority complex.

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Indeed. This ability to build and apply knowledge is one reason I tend to be an optimistic about the economic future.

The reason I tend to be a pessimistic, on the other hand, is that we appear to be trying to do everything we do to ensure that the golden goose can't lay eggs any more and to ensure that any eggs it does lay never hatch.

America has run circles around everyone else. Whether we will continue to do so, or follow the British example...that really is the question.s

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