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    GenerationExile: Intelectuals! Into The Rice Paddies!

    Keep intellectuals on the farms and suburbs and out of ivy towers!

    Started by: jabailo Raves:4

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    In our current system, we extract the best and the brightest from society. We rank them with tests, we sent them to college and we ensconce them in institutions. But now, more than ever, we need to get back to the medicine man, the wise man -- oh, hell, the crazy old guy down the street who seems to know a lot of stuff! What I mean is, we need smart guys in every town and hamlet to help people along and take advantage of all the new technology coming down the pike. Instead of spending 5 years writing a paper comparing Kierkegaard to Andrea Dworkin we need people who can fix stuff, help solve problems and tell us about this "new learning".

    I think there's a whole lot of geniuses out there who were not "academic" in the accepted way who are going to shine now. A couple of generations worth of high functioning autistic adults, and people with ADHD who spent their lives either hyper focussed on a single idea, or tinkering madly with a dozen projects on the go at all times that we'll be turning to now. Maybe thats why the numbers are on the rise? One of my children has Asperger's Syndrome and he interprets EVERYTHING through a screen of game constructs. I have cursed and thanked Blizzard for their games for a very long time :-). Another of my children has ADHD and a full gamut of learning disabilities that make traditional reading and writing next to impossible but she has such an incredible memory both aural and spatial that she can retell a story perfectly without any deviation that she heard 5 years ago. She's also a tinkerer and is always making new tools. Both of them are geniuses and neither did well in traditional school. My daughter is out there in the dirt, her brother...not so much. But both have very necessary skills.

    What defines an "Intellectual"? Some show their intelligence by thinking, others by doing. I believe that everyone is capable of contributing, but artificially placing people into areas they have no passion for - such as your intellectual on the farm - is a recipe for disaster.




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