Smart

In my life time I have witnessed a cultural change that came to a head with the 2016 election of Trump. One of the ways to understand this change is to think of the different ways to be smart. There is book smart, creative smart, street smart and people smart. During the early post war years of the 50's an 60's a person considered smart had some of all four of these qualities. Then things began to slowly shift to placing too much emphasis on book smart. Everyone had to go to college to prepare for the jobs of the future. Who should go would be determined by SAT scores and GPA's. These people then impressed upon their children the importance of formal education and in short order the educated elite were running the country. These elites listened to the economic experts, more elites, who promoted free trade and this brought more prosperity to the elites who barely noticed that it was destroying those who did not go to college. They claimed to be the champions of the working people while they took away their livelihoods. We had Wall Street and Main Street. The qualities of people smart, things like kindness, understanding, compassion and being neighborly lost value and the phrase who ever ends up with the most toys wins, became the new mantra. As the country entered the new century the regular people began to wake up to the fact that the experts were not always right and often times didn't care about them. Today we have one group of people with years of higher education and higher incomes who are mostly White and another group who are less educated and all colors. Somewhere along the way it dawned on people that one should never confuse higher education with intelligence that the other smarts like people smart, creative smart and street smart have value.