"Overeducated"

I think we have all heard people toss around the term "overeducated"--usually as an epithet--but I suspect that few have given much thought, or even any, to what is in back of it.

Obviously to call someone overeducated is to say they have been given more education than they ought to have had. Sometimes the word is an insult of someone else's intelligence--as in, yes, they have an advanced degree, but really they are quite stupid and the education was wasted on a person of such limited faculties. However, it seems to me that it is much more common for the speaker to mean something else--something which frankly gives away society's hypocrisy about respect for education to reveal what people who talk this way tend to be really thinking, two things in particular:

1. Society is, must and always will be a hierarchical thing, and the lower orders ought not to have knowledge beyond what will make them useful to their "betters."

2. Knowledge that is not of immediate practical utility--which in this society is equated with its monetary return to themselves or their employer--is of no value.

In short: people, especially the poor, but not necessarily just the poor, should be given enough education to enable them to do their jobs, but no more, and intellectuals who would seek knowledge for any other purpose are be despised.

I leave it to you to infer from this the politics of those who throw around terms like "overeducated."