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Summary Of Disliking Books By Gerald Graff

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In “Disliking Books,” by Gerald Graff, three major components stuck out to me. In paragraph 3, Graff talks about that for some in the working class, education is a source of freedom. This was a freedom that he took for granted. I feel like I can relate to this because I come from a middle class family, and while most of the time, I feel like being stuck in school most of the time is a burden, it is a freedom and a privilege that I take for granted as well. In paragraph 7, Graff also talks about that he did not like talking about books out loud in class because he never felt like he had the exact right things to say. Additionally, he discusses that even when he would speak up in class, his words didn’t seem intellectual enough to be fitting
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543 Words | 3 Pages

Most students from his background when they reached college would have to get serious which meant either pre-law pre-med or a major in business to take over the family business, but it being Graff had no family business and was not interested in medicine or the law he did not and enrolled in the liberal arts. His father pressured him to read more rather than just comic and magazines and even locked him in his room with nothing but a book, but none of it stuck because he was interested in them. The first time he seemed to really enjoy reading was in college when he began reading Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” when he chose to write an essay of it for class and his professor urged him to read of critics that were both for and against it. It was then he realized that even great authors made mistakes that even undergraduates could point

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He had no interest in law or medicine and found himself in the liberal arts and surprisingly majoring in English.   Graff learned to deal with his reading problem and managed to get good grades and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1959. Graff admitted that he didn’t finish reading any of the assigned classics, this included the contemporary works of Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Fitzgerald, whose work was said to be close this own experience.   Graff didn’t find anything that he could relate to from any of these authors work. When called on to discuss his assigned reading in class, Graff was extremely uncomfortable, and didn’t feel he had the intellectualism or vocabulary to present his assignments.

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1181 Words | 5 Pages

have it quite as well, however. His father was still alive and well, but left Wes with Mary, and didn’t care to have a relationship with his son. One of the few times Wes interacted with his father was when he went to his Mamie’s house. His Mamie was his father’s mother, and his father just happened to be drunk. Wes Moore, the author, attended a very expensive private school, but he did not try to excel.

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“In most industrialized nations, not least of all our economic rivals in East Asia, a kid who studies hard is lauded and held up as an example to other students” (line 37-40). Every other successful country values intellectual people. Instead of being outcasted they are praised. “How can a country where typical parents are ashamed…. Of their son reading Weber…… be expected to compete in the technology race with Japan or remain a leading political and cultural force in Europe?”

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515 Words | 3 Pages

When students are unaware of the history of social class, they begin to believe false information, such as, poor people deserve to be poor. Loewen does a great job of pointing out student’s misunderstanding of social status and strongly believes that it is the high school text books to

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Gerald Graff’s argument on how educational systems are missing a great opportunity to tap into “street smarts” and focus them into a path of academic work is indeed convincing (Graff, 198). After all, anyone who’s been through the American educational system knows odds are often stacked against the “street smarts.” This is especially true in english classes, where one is often required to read boring and somewhat heartless books like, 1984, Beowulf, and the majority of Shakespeare’s classics. This is not to say these books are bad or shouldn’t be read during one’s schooling years, instead, the problem is one of apathy. For instance, in my high school years I never even remotely liked to read books Othello, but I loved to read magazines and

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356 Words | 2 Pages

Although poverty is an enormous barrier for students, society believes that this is no excuse for continuing to live in poverty (Ladd, Noguera, Reville, & Starr, 2016). However, it is easy for the person who did not grow up in poverty and did not have serious

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1330 Words | 6 Pages

The Art in Education In first grade we had to draw a picture of what we would be doing 20 years from then. We had to draw what job we would have, what our hair would look like, what we would be wearing, and I chose to draw a picture of me drawing a picture. As a first grader I knew that my future would mirror what I was doing in that exact moment; I would still have curly hair, and I would still be an artist. Loudly proclaiming that I was going to be an artist when I grew up was ok in elementary school, but at the end of middle school it was often challenged with “but what are you really going to be?”

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(Douglass, 2014, p. 133) Education is equally yoked by the power to free an individual and to enslave an individual. Education frees an individual from the misleading bliss of ignorance, resulting in a new ability to think critically and to understand. However, ignorance does not require hard work as education does. Ignorance allows individuals to remain in their comfort zones.

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1142 Words | 5 Pages

Today, you either get educated or you get stuck in a dead-end job without much prospect for the future. The gap between those with a higher education and those without one is becoming wider with advancements in technology and the growing competitiveness of the job market. There are many dangers of this gap. One such danger is the people who have a higher educations having the leisure to ignore those who are less educated. Joy Castro in her essays “Hungry” and “On Becoming Educated” discusses her life and educational journey.

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Some say that our educational system is great and it gives every opportunity to become better. This has become somewhat true over time, but not entirely. An insightful philosopher named Paulo Freire asserts his views about the problematic education system being used in the sixties known as the “banking” concept in Pedagogy of the Oppressed. This concept is described as an almost autonomous way of

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Is there ever such a thing called impossible love? Well, Cameron and Patrick proved to the audience that there is! ’ 10 Things I Hate About You’ (1999), by Gil Junger has created the normal teenage life of high school, but with a twist as the most popular girl in school, Bianca Stratford, and her devilish sister, Katerina Stratford, suffers from the constant reminder of teen pregnancy from their father. With the rule ‘No dating until your sister does’ Cameron James is able to find a solution to their dating problem. From the help of his newly formed friend, Michael, the two are able to conjure up a plan to break this ever-lasting rule to win the heart of his one

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The main argument is that perceived throughout the reading is that the schools itself is failing students. They see a student who may not have the greatest test scores or the best grades, and degrade them from the idea of being intellectual. Graff states, “We associate the educated life, the life of the mind, too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts that we consider inherently weighty and academic” (Graff 244). Schools need to channel the minds of street smart students and turn their work into something academic.

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295 Words | 2 Pages

Richard Rodriguez wrote “Scholarship Boy” to explain the range of conflicting emotions he felt over receiving an education while growing up at home with his immigrant parents. He enjoyed school and learned quickly, but soon he knew more than his parents could comprehend. He was ashamed of his parents for not knowing as much as he did and this drove him away from them and more towards his instructors and his books. Though his parents were proud of him, he struggled to feel anything but embarrassed of them and this affected how he viewed himself and the education he was blessed to have. When Gerald Gaff was young, he did not feel that books related to his life and that they, therefore, were not worth reading.

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907 Words | 4 Pages

He was embarrassed of his parent’s lack of education, that “he cannot afford to admire his parents” (Rodriguez 20). He was embarrassed of his roots, his uneducated parents, and the fact that he received an education because he was a “scholarship boy.” When Richard found himself through books and the finest institutions, he gave up the little control he had over himself to every teacher he ever had. In the banking concept, Freire refers to students as an object, a puppet that can be manipulated by an instructor. In such a system students aren’t asked to exercise their critical thinking skills, because a teacher has superior and they are believed to hold all the knowledge.

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