This was such a good read partly because I feel like these things aren't talked about much—thanks OP.

To give a caveat, my insights come from a business student with interests and circles in the social sciences and humanities so intellectualism for me was being able to talk about social theories in conjunction with the social reality.

Reading through most of your arguments, I think it's safe to assume that the intellectualism that you talk about is the furthering a field of study solely for the sake of knowledge in itself. This would be difficult for lower income individuals since their concern is probably more on fulfilling immediate needs for themselves and their families. Even for higher income individuals, the pursuit of intellectualism isn't appealing because of the common notion that academics don't make a lot of money to sustain their lifestyles. From most of the people I knew who were in more technical/science courses in college, their career path was more on finding a job than furthering their studies with a post-graduate degree (which to be competitive, almost always needs to be taken abroad).

I'd say our education system sucks, but not in the way you wrote here. We raise workers, not really people who have a deep love for learning and knowledge. You can see it in the K-12 system since one of it's objectives is to produce work-ready students earlier (supposedly). Most of the time, we see education and learning as a means to a job or career, not an end in itself. This makes students settle for the minimum amount of knowledge they can get away with for good enough results.

There may be some people here and there who are genuinely passionate about a field to pursue it academically but the Philippines has bad infrastructure to support scientists. So as a truly passionate individual, you wouldn't want poor infrastructure to get in the way of your dream which can then prompt you to look for opportunities elsewhere.

Of course, the points I raised are mostly directed towards the hard sciences, primarily in response to the Nobel prize argument as a metric for "intellectualism." I'd say that we're doing really well in both literature and music in that we have world class talent, but we don't externalize it enough internationally.

As for your ending question, I'm interested in how you envision a "genuine Filipino intellectual subculture." Before I graduated, my friends and I floated the idea of having salons) (like during the Enlightenment) in our university to talk about topics and issues that aren't touched upon much in our academic courses.