When Rick Santorum said, “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side… colleges and universities, they’re not going to be on our side,” he was employing an anti-intellectual American trope that goes back farther than apple pie.

Here at Cultural Weekly, we like smart and we like education. One of the glories of the Internet age is that it is easier and more democratic to get smarter and more educated. In the past we’ve shared access to more than 500 free courses from top universities and 375 free e-books.
We’re especially thrilled that Google has announced a free, open source code for creating online education, called Course Builder.
Here’s a video from their lead on the project.

Yes, you’ll need to know some code. Wanna learn? Try CodeSchool.
To get smarter about American anti-intellectualism, we recommend Richard Hoftstadter’s excellent book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, as true today as when it was written nearly 50 years ago.