If I was putting a positive spin on education I might say this: Education tries to prepare young people for growing up into society as good citizens.

Higher education in particular gives them lateral thinking skills and helps them learn how to analyse conceptually. With development they can apply their minds to problems and therefore in some constructive way make a contribution to the world. Higher education encourages scepticism of thought, teaches how to unravel an argument and then remake it perhaps in a imaginative way. It might even encourage students who are bright enough to challenge accepted norms and values and reformulate them and as such even assist in progress in a particular field.

At the earlier levels of education, in the modern age self-esteem is considered important. This compares favourably with previous times when there was a good chance the learning experience could just as easily diminish confidence. For example it selected and separated too early the academically talented from the less talented. It was realised that students could be detrimentally affected by this in later life, having been marked down too soon. Low self-esteem was identified as the cause of many social problems and as a consequence society was doing itself a disservice by not having an education system that tried to encourage self-esteem. Attempts were made to upgrade systems that had the opposite effect of the old ways of selection. Despite ongoing arguments about whether contemporary education succeeds there can be little doubt that over the past thirty years lifting self-esteem has been an intent.

These remarks on education are a preamble. My comment here is about contrasting the finer aspirations of education with what happens in the wider world, for example in the world of television and pop culture. In every other reality show ridicule is popular. This format covers a broad spectrum of activity: from music to modelling to business entrepreneurs. Even the sensitive environment of relationship issues isn't immune in the hands of a Tricia or a Jeremy Kyle where people with serious emotional problems are paraded in front of a large audience to be jeered at. The content of such programmes is restricted only by the imagination (or lack thereof) of the creators. Virtually any context is fair game.

It's also inescapable to notice that many of the participants in this kind of programming are often under-educated or emotionally retarded, invariably both. Yet their views and attitudes are presented to the point of quasi-celebration. On shows and documentaries across the board individuals with no sophisticated thoughts or insights whatsoever are put centre-stage and given a relevance disproportionate to their station.

It is a curious phenomenon that such an interest in the moronic should be happening at a time when there are more university degrees than ever, in a society better informed and more sophisticated in its choices than at any time. And although television to be fair does produce a wide range of programming including intellectual content it does seem that it presents with a celebration of stupidity and an assumption of ignorance, or at the very least, immaturity, on the part of its viewers, some of the very things that many societies throughout history have tried to work against. We have arrived at a strange juncture where education elevates and pop culture denigrates.

If I were to look for explanations, perhaps two would be worth consideration. First, that the educated types who are the backbone of decision making and power in society - city bankers to programme makers - are engaged in a kind of voyeurism, a car-crash mentality that gets pleasure from watching base people reduced to their base state. Second, and worse, that our world with its super-educated populace is not as sophisticated as it thinks it is and at an emotional level the bankers and programmers are still primitive in themselves and manage only a veneer of intelligence as demanded by their jobs. There are many clever people I guess who enjoy watching the less clever ridiculed. There are many clever people with posh accents who are just as emotionally retarded as the backwater proles with their provincial drones.

A complex matter as usual, but whatever the explanations and analyses it does seem to me something of a culture clash, yet another contradiction in need of further resolution.