for about a decade or so, i had an official role generating resources for informal adult education based on published research within the academic structure as part of it's 100+ year old "service/outreach" mission. over the last century, resources have been stripped from this mission, probably because it was structured so that communities had a big say in what sort of education they wanted delivered, preventing a full blown top-down approach to community development that powerful people deploy to maintain uneven development.

what i took from my time working in this sphere is that advancing the cause of literacy means meeting people where they are. among other skills, this requires creativity and humility which are two abilities that are not particularly valued by the PhD research or academic publishing processes resulting in an overall abdication by the "highly educated" of their responsibility to their communities. most prefer to scoff at the great many who lack the training they received and instead stand idle above the crowd as experts.

while the adversarial stripping of resources from our institutions that provide a basic, universal right to a broad education has lead us to the current situation, too many of our "public intellectuals" are reinforcing the problem by refusing to see their enhanced duty and responsibility to disseminate knowledge to their communities broadly, instead of gatekeeping it behind credentialism and careerism. there are obviously exceptions to this, as individuals, but they are the cranks and the burnouts with derailed careers. the elitist sociopaths are running the departments and colleges and they would happily disenfranchise everyone without a college degree before they'd advocate for a right to universal higher education.