Thank-you for posting this.

You have managed to articulate - much more eloquently than I could ever hope to - what has been running through my mind for what seems like forever.

My cultural background is European, not American, but its culture is characterized by exactly the same anti-intellectualism you describe.

I remember my first trip to India when I was high-school age. All my (Euro) friends and I were interested in was wallowing in pop culture. But in India, every kid I met was desperately striving for intellectual betterment (I have since met kids from India's super elite and learned that this is not the case amongst them).

The moment of insight came when I was sitting at a roadside cafe in the evening drinking an underage beer, and watching a group of kids my age huddle around a streetlamp with a math textbook. It suddenly hit me: the Indian kids knew what they had to do for humanity to progress. My friends and I in the west didn't have a clue - we were just wasting time and space.

I'd like to say that that realization made me seize the day and start living my life to the full (via an inspirational montage sequence). It didn't, sadly. But I did notice a marked change in my attitude to acquiring knowledge. Whereas I'd always tried to hide my bookishness in the past, I began to be unembarrassed to be seen reading, or caught using a long word. Because we need to get past this anti-intellectual thing in the west, or we'll lose all we've worked for.

OK, my tangent was infinitely more rambling than yours!

I guess all I really wanted to say was: thank you for sharing your thoughts. They really resonate :)