The group or class of intellectuals representing a cultural, social, or political elite; an intellectual is also known as a sage, savant, pundit / pandit, maven, polymath, polyhistor, scholar, scholiastic, scholastici, philosophe, casuist, pedagogue, autodidact, virtuoso / virtuosa, cognoscente, connoisseur, dilettante, sophisticate, magus, solon, mandarin, brahmin. In ancient times, learned persons were patronized by aristocrats, but the division of labor, having been enabled by Medieval technologies, and that era's "conspiracy of learning", evolved into professions. The literati is usually differentiated from the bourgeoisie (uncultured) and proletariat (illiterate). It has only been in the modern era that the impractical and unrealistic Ivory Tower egghead has acquired the pejorative sense of the aloof and disdainful highbrow. Reciprocal prejudice presumes the illiterate (unlettered) to be either stupid (thoughtless) or dumb (mute). With a rich oral tradition, people differentiate between "learning to read" and "learning from reading". A "man of letters" derives from a "school of letters", which derives from the "republic of letters", as an idealized subculture comprised of the educated; which "book learning" by volumes of "silent instructors" must be distinguished from "real life learning" ("The sick shall be the physician's textbooks."). Among the conflicts of the Reformation was the contradiction of iconoclastic thinking being inculcated by literary idolatry ... an orthodox substitution instead of a heterodox liberation. It has been alleged that orality is too imprecise for the preservation of civilized history and the documentation of scientific inquiry, but the supposedly disinterested recordings of authentic truth have not been impartial and unbiased; so the distortions of revisionism seem to be immaterial to their medium. Since most people in the modern era obtain their data through an audio-visual broadcast medium, validation and verification is professionally crucial, if timely and legitimate decisions are to be made. See renaissance, enlightenment, athenaeum, literature, lingua franca, immortals, mentor.