Hey, was she on NPR a couple of weeks ago? They were discussing which was harder-brain surgery or rocket science and a woman called in to say she’d done both!
Her vote was for brain surgery being the more difficult-no do-overs 
The Vice-Principal at my elementary school told me that I was “too smart for my own good.” She got flak for that one, because I was smart enough to know it wasn’t something she should have said, and I repeated it to the resource teacher who was in charge of my Enriched Learning program.
In Grade One, they sent me home with a phonics workbook. I was furious and I shook it in my mother’s face saying; “I don’t do baby work.” I was (and am) a sight reader. I had taught myself when I was 4. My mother called the teacher to explain this to her, and tell her that I had read Jacob Two-Two Meets The Hooded Fang the summer before Kindergarten.
“Oh, you mean, you read it to her,” The teacher said to my mom.
"No, " Mom explained, “I found her sitting on a milk crate in the back yard one afternoon, reading it herself.”
The teacher didn’t believe her, so Mom insisted that they give me a reading test. I was reading at a Fourth Grade level at that time. I was excused from the phonics exercises after that.
In high school, I quoted LaRochefoucault in Social Studies class; “There is something not entirely unfortunate about the misfortunes of one’s friends”. They all looked at me like I had grown another head. Then the teacher was like; “Well, aaaaanywaaayyy…”, so I guess she didn’t get what I was trying to say, either.
And then there was the time we were discussing The Great Gatsby, and I was told I couldn’t talk about memes in my seminar. Because my English teacher didn’t know what memes were. God forbid I should give a seminar that could teach the teacher something. :rolleyes:
Luckily I had other teachers who were passionate, curious and enthusiastic, to balance out all the cold fish. Otherwise, I would’ve quit school.
The pervasive cult of anti-intellictualism is part of the reason it is so exasperating living in the U.S. It seems that people in this country that have gifts of an athletic or physical nature are respected and even fawned over. On the contrary, it is socially permissable, encouraged even, to shun or show scorn for those with mental abilities above the norm. Even minor, accidental transgressions, such as the use of a word not in a middle school reader in a conversation, or an admission of knowing the name of an English author besides Shakespeare, are widely met with accusations of being full of braggadocio or simply social ostrasicm.
To avoid this, I have met many, many intelligent people that so downplay their intelligence, that they lose their own curiosity about the world, and this is a tragedy.
Note: I do not consider myself an intellectual. I don’t think it’s one of those titles that you can give yourself, and, as yet, nobody has bestowed that title upon me. At least, not that I’m aware of. I’ll share my experience, though.
For me, being intellectual wasn’t that big of a deal. See, while I could and often did study things far beyond what was required, I felt no need to prove what I could do, and what I knew, to anybody else. The only problem was that at first, I didn’t know that I was supposed to hide my intelligence.
I’ve learned that seven year-olds who read medical books get punched in the stomach. I’ve learned that four year-olds who make accurate corrections to their fathers’ driving skills get told to be quiet. I learned to slack off when I got bored; since I have a short attention span when it comes to things that I already know, this is a common occurance.
As a result, by the time I was maybe nine, I’d learned to hide what I knew. For the most part, it worked pretty well. People didn’t tease me for being smart anymore. They might’ve teased me for being overweight (which I mostly grew out of) and for being a bad dresser (ditto), but never for being smart.
Then, in 9th grade, I found myself in an environment where intelligence and intellectual curiousity were, for the most part, valued. I flourished in those areas that would allow me to show my knowledge, and create, and discover new things. Yet my old habits died hard–or, I should say, are dying hard. I still act as though school and grades and test scores are no big deal. But every now and then, I surprise people. It’s grand fun, now.
Back then, though, it was a nightmare. I had no one to talk to. I had no one who could understand me or, gods, even keep up with me. I still scare people; I have a near-photographic/tape recorder memory, and excellent recall. Teachers have acknowledged this.
The problem is this; because I am curious–not only intellectually, but also about matters of life, experience, and the human heart–I doubt that I can dedicate my life to learning. I enjoy doing too much. I enjoy learning things that you can’t learn in the classroom, or that the classrooms refuse to teach. This leads to abysmal job prospects. But, in order to be happy, it’s something that I might have to deal with.
Additionally, I’m good at being practical when it’s a matter of my survival, and I know that I am not from a great sum of money. My dad’s unemployed, and, with the way he’s spending, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay in college long enough to get my BA without getting myself into debt (something that I’d planned to not have). Graduate school becomes a non-option, and the only jobs I can get with my degree (English major, Psychology minor), will probably be non-creative and mind-numbing. But I’ll do it to survive.
I’ll live off my library card. I’ll read all the books that my dad wouldn’t let me read, because he thought I should be watching the television instead. I might be broke, but at least I might be fulfilled.
Schadenfreunde? I think it is part of the base nature of all humans, witness rubbernecking while driving past car accidents, and has probably played a larger rule in history than most people would ever suspect.
That’s pretty ignorant. If I was to teach a course in critical thinking, memes would be covered on the first day.
Not to be outdone, I had a geography teacher in high school who insisted that Stonehenge formed natually, as the result of some geological process. Real bright guy he was. Worse, his statement seemed perfectly acceptable to most of the class.
The difference for me comes not from intellectualism vs. anti-intellectualism. Intellectualism is merely taking delight in the things one knows and learns, and as such pretty much anything can be called intellectual. Those guys who can take apart an engine and put it back together in less than ten minutes, and love talking about how engines work, and how to maximize their output, and all that other stuff I know nothing about? Those guys are intellectuals. Those guys who know everything there is to know about a specific sport, and can quote you stats on players and major moments in the history of the game? Those guys are intellectuals, too. Intellectualism does not at its base have anything to do with obscure works of literature.
And not knowing something is no cause to feel inferior to anyone. Though I love to read, and have in the past looked down my nose at those who don’t, I understand now that simply not enjoying reading does not automatically disqualify someone from the upper echelons of human intelligence. It doesn’t make you stupid or wrong, it just makes you different from me. So?
The thing that really bothers me, however, is the absolute refusal to learn. There is no shame in ignorance. There is great shame in refusing to amend that ignorance. Shame comes from people who hold fast to wrong ideas, to incorrect facts, and refuse to be gainsaid. The people who accept what they are told, and look no further, the surface being sufficient for them. These are the people, I find, who tend to judge others as being “too smart for their own good.” But in reality, they’re no different from those who qualify themselves as the intellectual elite- both groups are comprised of people who see the world only narrowly and look down on everyone else. Extremes will meet; the guy who makes fun of you for using words with more than two syllables and the guy who mocks you for using words with less than three have a lot more in common than either would like to admit.
At this point I’d like to confess a secret to you, my friends of the SDMB: as a child in gradeschool, I was often made fun of for my large vocabulary, and one of the most common taunts was “What do you do, go home and read the dictionary every night?”
And in my wounded pride, I denied it.
But you know what? I really did go home and read the dictionary every night. And I loved every minute of it. 
I have read dictionaries and encyclopedias for fun too!
I’m a 30 year old, who has also retained much of that original imagination from childhood - lucky me.
Though not a towering intellectual, I am a repository of all sorts of obscure knowledge!
Somehow I escaped school at the end of it all, and still had a desire to learn. There’s so much interesting stuff out there!!!
I have a tiny nucleus of friends who are as enthusiastic for discovering tidbits of information as they ever were.
One of the worst things to me, is seeing “unstimulated” minds. The younger they are, the worse it is.
I thought I suffered but I NEVER got anything as bad as some of the stories here. I made my days more bearable, however, by playing little games that wen’t completely unnoticed by other people. Like deliberately using big words in a way that, if you knew what they meant, would sound absurd. Or writing essays where the starting letter of each line went from A-Z. Or spending an entire day referring to myself in the 3rd person.