It's more that geeks oppose old institutions having a monopoly on knowledge than that they oppose any sort of knowledge at all. Maybe there's some resistance to the rigid, hierarchical structure of "intellectualism" as well.
The idea that institutions have a monopoly on knowledge is starting to become preposterous. The closest thing to a monopoly is a few journals, but their days are numbered. The monopoly doesn't exist. There is absolutely nothing stopping anyone from buying any textbook and learning what they want to learn, from buying all the tools they need and teaching themselves. At the end of the day, you can learn anything anyone else learned going to college. If you are upset because you can't get a job because you don't have a degree to prove what you know, then that's something you need to take up with the companies that are doing the hiring.
How can there be a monopoly when there are hundreds to thousands of individual institutions competing for each other? Of course, college isn't free or unencumbered by some silly rules, but neither is buying an iPhone.
Institutions are merely hubs of knowledge, a natural enough occurrence. Maybe information does want to be free, but free birds of a feather flock together.
I personally feel the image that they are or are trying to cultivate a monopoly is a misguided perception based on jealousy, resentment, etc
What I've observed is that to really get to the deep learning, the deep knowledge, requires moving into the 'elite', and learning from them.
Think of it as applied Pareto: find the top 20 who do 80% of the work, and learn from them so you can move into them.
One of the most absolutely valuable pieces of 'research' I have done as part of my Master's is learning about systems that were designed and built before 1980. Then, learning about how many of those ideas were recycled and or forgotten in the trash heap behind Unix's house.
Definitely agree with you, most of the value in a the school system comes on the day they hand you a piece of paper. The school system is not intellectual, it's elitist.
It's the whole idea that someone thinks their answer is right because someone dropped two hundred grand on an education they could have gotten for a dollar fifty in late fees at the public library.
I hear it all the time, "is he good engineer?" "yeah, he went to <who fucking cares>"
If that kind of thinking is anti-intellectual than sign me up for the anti-intellectual camp.
I want to really emphasize what the parent post says.
I'm currently an undergraduate and I am having an exceptional experience. Two summers ago, I worked with a professor one-on-one to build a compiler for a subset of Scheme. From last summer through to the fall of 2010, I was working at Intuit which is by no means the epitome of excellent software engineering, but I got to live in San Diego, experience a whole new culture, learn to sail, and experience software engineering in the "real world".
Finally, this summer and fall, I get to work with Olin Shivers (yes, him[1]) and some erudite, poignant grad students.
Even in classes, you can take advantage of having an expert to ask questions of, and believe me, I take full advantage of it. I've spent hours inquiring about the LHC, Mandarin idioms, and the history behind and intricacies of English grammar rules during my time here.
The school system is an opt-in, opportunity machine.
In my experience this is all good and well until you're bombarded with homework and exams. Sure, university would be a great and magical place without them, but when you're given assignments that could easily fill a week's "free" (read: not in classes) time, each week, then the fun and games stop.
You might say that this is a learning experience on its own - how to cope with heavy workload. But:
a) when I look at myself and at others it definitely means that at some point you start to study for the sake of studying, not understanding
b) I could (arguably) create more value for my life and possibly the world, as well as learning to cope with pressure, by investing so much energy in other endeavors
