Blog Prompt #2: Who are the leading public intellectuals of our day?

To think of leading public intellectuals today was a difficult task.  I say this because I spend so much of my time trying to determine how I will convey information to an audience that quite often needs to be entertained more than they want to learn.  For me, educators carry a certain amount of the intellectual weight simply because they have an unknown audience that looks to them for information and wisdom.

My parents used to was a program called the Tavis Smiley Show when I was younger.  Listening to them have conversation about the topics and issues Tavis Smiley presented as well as the people he would have on his show is something that I think helped me to grow.  It is not that he was a leading intellectual, but he would raise issues and questions that could be answered by intellectuals which I then saw discussed by my parents and others.  I feel that there need to be more of these discussions today so children learn to speak up for themselves and issues they feel strongly connected to.

Comments

  1. Steve MacekApril 11, 2017 at 2:16 PM

    I used to love Smiley and West when they were on WBEZ Sunday afternoons. It was a real disappointment when they took it off to make way for yet another youth-oriented "personal narrative" show (the Moth).

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