I'd start with a reading of Jo Freeman's classic, The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Freeman attributes, in some part, the breakdown of the women's liberation movement to the cutting down of anyone who was smart, had a solid domain of knowledge, and wasn't afraid to use it.
http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
There are others who have since written on this topic. A good start would be to read the bibliography and footnotes in Alison Jaggar's, _Feminist Politics and Human Nature_.
I agree that it's not that people don't want to learn or that they have no interest in art and culture; it's that they've been taught since birth to believe that theory is bad. Read any of the great books on pragmatism as a cultural (not philosophical per se) phenom. in the U.S.for more examples of what everyone's talking about. It's the same thing that you were railing about on the Chomsky thread and the specialized language thread. The same impetus behind these far too common sentiments is what, I thought, Doug was talking about by anti-intellectualism. Chomsky is a classic anti-intellectual, IYAM. Those goofy intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities are useless, full of hot air, and engage in nothing but obfuscation. They have no practical, real world experience. They live in an ivory tower. They're good for nothing and waste everyone's time.
This isn't putting people down and sneering, but locating real material causes for why this attitude is prevalent. For one, you can connect this to the social conditions of how people labor everyday. This is real stuff, the way you work everyday shapes the way you think about the world. And it's real, material stuff when you put in place a system of schooling that diverts people away from higher education, when you have a system of schooling that teaches working class people that learning is not worth their time.
Real material stuff and for a study of it in the US, see "Ain't No Makin' It" and Elijah Anderson's work.
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