barrelomonkeys wrote:Blixa, it's because our schools are spitting out ready made workers, not thinkers.
Intellectual is a four letter word in America.
The history of american higher education is interesting in this respect. I see two recent (and not unconnected) historical moments as wreaking some of the worst damage we now suffer from.
One is the destruction by McCarthism of what scant "left" tradition existed in the american academy (I'm speaking of the fuller understanding of politics, history and economics beyond the current needs of bourgeois capitalism that one finds in every other nation). The attack on Hollywood is well known; less known the evisceration of the university: lives ruined, jobs lost, an intellectual tradition and body of work destroyed or retarded (by the way, this was often carried out under the ruse of routing homosexuals from the campus!).
The other is the total (and still continuing) subordination of the academy to the needs of business or Eisenhower's famous phrase, "the military/industrial complex" (private as opposed to public needs, in other words). Did you know that it is from this that the "discipline" of Freshman Composition emerged?
Pedagogical history and theory are one of my scholarly areas of expertise...