Does the UK still have an 'intellectual class'?

Ok, completely agree then.
Which is a real shame because schools could plug this gap, but I guess it's level of some teachers at present...

I agree! But I mean accessible in the sense that if it is not a mainstream taste then it gets discounted. Basically it seems that unless children are already familiar or their families are, then the mainstream just says don’t bother.

It has changed. My school had regular outings to concerts and visits from musicians. My parents listened at home. Now m these things are mediated out of schools

@bombastix

Because if it not accessible then you are upsetting people

How is classical/jazz whatever music is not accessible? If anything, it is more accessible than anything else - YouTube is your friend and it's always free for classic, unlike some paid for videos. Also generally classical music concerts are way more affordable than pop. Excl Royal Opera you can get tickets for 15 quid. Taylor Swift on the other hand...

ETA - my DCs primary introduced them to classic from Reception. DCs are teens now, they are enjoying it more than pop.

Because if it not accessible then you are upsetting people or patronising them.

i think it’s a lot more patronising to reserve certain things for certain people which is what we have now. I think it is much worse than when my parents grew up, when there was not such a reductionist view about what people and children could understand. It’s vastly more elitist to not even bother but reserve these things for a certain class

Why is it snobby? Fry can be very amusing but he is incredibly pretentious. IMO clever people get their information from a wide variety of sources both high and low brow.

The problem is that people have stopped being able to listen each other and disagree without it becoming personal.

V interesting discussion.

I wouldn’t say I am a great intellectual - I like all manner of things including football and Take a Break magazine - but I do live in a cultural wasteland - a reasonably affluent suburb but one in which the only person I’ve ever had anything in common with is ds’s 80-year-old piano teacher.

Schools today: oh, you could weep. I don’t know where to start with the dumbing down. When a governor at the dcs’ primary school I tentatively suggested that the music offerings could vary a bit, eg a bit of classical/folk/jazz - all sorts really - rather than always mega-bland pop music in assembly/during lunch. The Head looked at me witheringly and spat, “The pupils cannot access classical music and it is boring and not fun for them.”

I think this is true.
Add it to a culture which has always been suspicious of 'intellectuals' and you get a lot of really boring conversations!

I studied philosophy at university and was so shocked at what went on with Kathleen Stock. The idea that students would criticise lecturers for wrong-think would have been unthinkable then. The thing that bugs me most about the trans "debate" is the fact we're told not that we have to act in a certain way, but we have to believe what we're told to believe. Haven't they read 1984?

This! I watched the beginning of the next few in the hope that they would have some interesting characters leading to good discussions. Nope, all dumbed down.

The first series of BB started off well and was quite interesting: they completed proper team building tasks and interacted quite normally for that kind of situation. It began to go downhill with all the 'Nasty Nick' hype that set the president for what was to come. NN's antics aside, the interactions were delightfully subtle and hark back to a simpler time before everyone lost their minds.

@Orangemintcream

"After that they began deliberately selecting “interesting” people who would interact and cause conflict. It declined rapidly"

I think Rizzle Kicks caught that trend in "Lost Generation " with the lines:

"Oi big brothers in the house now yeah
I said screw the voting and talking
I just wanna see
People fight an have sex"

One hopes not!

Otherwise one is going to get into a bit of a quandry, and one is not allowed to chop orf people's heads these days. Gaffaw, gaffaw.

I'm only joshing,
Although open windows are a dangerous thing, don't you know?

Hard agree with @Orangemintcream. The contestants were also more educated - I can only really remember Mel. It was such a groundbreaking show at the time.

The first big brother was actually interesting - they chose random people and they all had to interact.

After that they began deliberately selecting “interesting” people who would interact and cause conflict. It declined rapidly.

OP, you might enjoy this article https://unherd.com/2025/05/the-flattening-of-the-human-mind/. (Well, "enjoy" may not be the right word.)

I don’t think the English overall like conspicuous display of intellect, and since university education expanded this hermetic class of people that used to dominate academia and media have had to compete with more popular taste.

Commercial life is necessarily more vulgar. It’s about making money. I don’t expect much intellectual depth at work from my younger colleagues because unless they’ve had a particular background they will have specialised early at school and got very good at their subject. They’ve also typically had to work harder, get into debt and compete to higher standards than my generation did.

The people at work who have got all this conscious intellect and complex thinking - usually pretty well off and for generations at that.

That's such an interesting point about access to shallow information. AI is going to make this whole trend so much worse. A few weeks ago I spoke to someone who genuinely argued that it is ableist to expect students to complete uni work without AI.

I am a university lecturer and I teach in the creative arts. Most of our students don't bother attending lectures, watching films or reading articles. They just use google.

Which is shocking, isn't it? I don't teach an academic subject, so I wouldn't expect students to be particularly that way inclined, but the lack of interest in expert opinion is an eye-opener. I would talk to them about the enshittification of the internet and how Google can no longer be trusted for accurate results, but attendance so low, there probably would not be enough people in the room to stage a useful debate. Maybe universities like mine are part of the problem...

interestingly, I think the availability of information on the Internet might be part of the problem.

Years ago, if you knew about something it’s because you had studied it - school, uni, library etc. if you hadn’t, you didn’t know about it and would be forced to say “I don’t know”, because really, you just wouldn’t.

nowadays, you can access dumbed down versions of just about anything on the internet.

nobody says “I don’t know” anymore; they google the most basic premise, pick a side, and will argue that point like they are an expert and spread misinformation.

Fabulous thread: thank you for starting it

I do believe that intellectual curiosity is on the decline. For instance, when you watch videos of ordinary folk from the 1960s, they are articulate and knowledgeable about all manner of liberal arts subjects. I do think we are being infantilised and much is being dumbed down.

People inhabit echo chambers so true debate is difficult unless, like OP, you have a trusted circle, where robust discussions are possible. I also find a lot of people are unable to follow a discussion logically and are quick to take offence when none is intended.

I home educate my daughter now: intially, this decision was taken out of necessity but now I embraced it as an opportunity to introduce her to a classical education. I received a somewhat lack lustre education- myself- so I am deriving some benefit.

I only wish I knew people-in real life- who shared these interests. It's quite lonely when you dont have that outlet. That said, I will look into some of those YouTube recommendations. Thank you.

I agree with this, and I'm a dyed-in-the-wool champagne socialist.

I'm also an ex-TV producer, and I think you're quite right. I don't consider myself to be an intellectual, but find myself reaching for the off button on R4 more and more. The inanity and the throaty/whispered podcast "investigations", weird grammar (using the present tense to talk about historical narrative, why is this a thing? It's just confusing.) and insistance on covering mainstream celebrity-driven issues is just depressing.

Where's the rigour? There seems to be more in the consumer programmes like More or Less than in the documentaries.

Am I just a curmudgeon? I'm only 53!

It's interesting - there's so much more access to information now if you know where to look, but I also feel it's no longer normalised.

For example, I can search out lectures from great universities, or watch recommendations if debates on YouTube (thanks PPs) but the average level of content on mainstream media is incredibly low. The BBC news website, for example, is dominated by short videos with such shallow analysis as to be useless. I understand the need to be accessible, but the aim to inform seems to have entirely disappeared.

That's without getting into the black and white thinking that is so commonplace now. It feels more comparable to picking a football team than proper discussion. Choose a side - Israel or Palestine, Brexit or EU, environment or industry - never admit to nuance, always consider the other team to be unthinkingly evil, compromise is for the weak.

I remember it happening in the 90s. News programmes became bite sized as people had shorter attention spans.

TV began to follow a formula and it was considered too expensive to nurture talent and make heavy programmes. Yoof culture was discovered and pursued.

With Big Brother came the cheap reality TV format. It wasn't scripted and involved bunging people somewhere and watching them. We also developed shows with celebrities.

We used to have regular plays, arts programmes, political discussions, documentaries and interviews. Now we have Ant and Dec goading people into eating grubs.

I have been wondering when it was that being intellectual became unfashionable.

The pursuit of knowledge was prized in the Victorian era.

Now the majority want to watch love island and the like - with fake manufactured people and their fake manufactured scenarios.

When did this happen exactly ?

In the 60s 70s there were intellectual discussions on radio and tv, Malcolm Muggeridge comes to mind.

However the interviewees were from a very privileged class, mostly men. People from very wealthy families who had been to public school then on to Oxbridge. Studying the classics or whatever.

Nowadays the equivalent rich privileged kids head into the city. Into businesses to make them richer. Or perhaps some of the Oxbridge students aren’t rich to start with so have other priorities than intellectual debate.