Summary Of Hidden Intellectualism By Gerald Graff

In Gerald Graff’s “Hidden Intellectualism”, Graff argues that there exist common misconceptions about being “street-smart”, or having a versed background in dealing with situations of life outside of the school environment. He states that people too often view street smarts and the knowledge gained at schools as being unrelated but, in actuality, they are two sides of the same coin. What is learned at school, which are “too narrowly and exclusively” categorized into subjects and texts, is considered by society’s viewpoint intellectual. However, the knowledge obtained from growing up on the streets is viewed under those same lens, “anti-intellectual,” as coined by Graff. These two perspectives, as Graff claims, are not black and white because

While he grew up exhibiting behaviors of “anti-intellectualism,” he hadn’t realized that all the discussion and debates of “sports teams, movies, and toughness that my friends I engaged in,” were part of the process of growing up to be an intellectual. Graff looked back and acknowledged that he had acquired the knowledge to “weigh different kinds of evidence, move between particulars and generalizations, summarize the view of others, and enter a conversation about ideas” through reading sports books and

They believe under the wrong impression that writings which incorporate topics like “Plato, Shakespeare, the French Revolution, and nuclear fission” are the only sources of scholarly work. Graff emphasizes the nonexistent linkage between the subject of the paper and the educational value that society has mistakenly thought to exist. Instead, that truly defines the educational weight is the writer’s own stake into the writing of any topic. Graff asserts that the individual’s own interest and devotion to analyzing and offering his or her own viewpoint is what produces scholarly work and having intellectual discussions. In his experience in the sports world, his dedication to staying aware of the “arguments, debates, problems for analysis, and intricate statistics” has allowed for more intellectual discussions than what can be had at