Summary Of Hidden Intellectualism By Gerald Graff

Critiquing Gerald Graff’s “Hidden Intellectualism: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing” In his essay “Hidden Intellectualism: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing” Gerald Graff discusses the different uses of intellectualism and how they don’t only correspond to just high level thinking pieces of work such as Shakespeare. His work examines the inner working of higher level of thinking on many things that would be normally described as “street smart” or every day knowledge such as football, dancing, and many other topics that don’t live up to the high standards as a Picasso. While many of his points are based on life stories the deep thinking that arises from his argument makes a statement and shows how intellectualism is spread

Gerald Graff explains, “the fact that we associate those street smarts with anti-intellectual concerns. We associate educated life, the life of the mind, too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts that we consider inherently weighty and academic. We assume that it’s possible to wax intellectual about Plato, Shakespeare, The French Revolution, and nuclear fission, but not about cars, dating, fashion, sports, TV, or video games” (#). What he is explaining is that to many times school systems force feed student’s material that they have little or no interested in and think they will read the item and not google it and take the easy road. Now Graff doesn’t say that students should not learn about the important figures that shaped the world as it is, but instead ween them in by getting them interested in something they enjoy first. He clearly shows this when explaining, “Students do need to read models of Intellectually challenging writing-and Orwell is a great one-if they are to become intellectuals themselves. But they would be more prone to take on intellectual identities if we encouraged them to do so at first on subjects that interest them rather than ones that interest us” (Graff #). I will admit many times through my high school career I have used sparknotes and other ways to work around

He explains this when stating, “When you entered sports debates, you became part of a community that was not limited to your family and friends. But was national and public. Whereas schoolwork isolated you from others,” (Graff #). With school and school work in general is mostly done on an individual basis students do homework alone, test alone, exams alone, and rarely do they interact with others, but with sports it more fluid and deems for interaction and discussion. Graff goes on to say that because of the interaction and how you can talk about LeBron James’s dunk last night with anyone on a train makes sports more intellectual than school. Graff explains this when saying, “sports after all was full of challenging arguments, debates, problems for analysis, and intricate statistics that you could care about, as school conspicuously was not” (#). With this statement entirely goes against what he wants throughout his work, just because sports are more popular does not make it more intellectual. Intellectualism is an equal playing field, with the right critical thinking and a great discussion anything from shopping to Shakespeare to football can be expanded on and be classified as