Summary Of Hidden Intellectualism By Gerald Graff

Hidden Intellectualism is an article written by Gerald Graff on the school system and how being street smart is better than being book smart. Graff fills most of the article with stories from his childhood and relating the issue back to himself. He starts the article by asserting that “…schools and colleges might be at fault for missing the opportunity to tap into such street smarts and channel them into good academic work.” Immediately Graff blames the school system for not providing a way for street smart students to be academically engaged. Graff goes on to talk about his childhood throughout most of the article and strongly relates his love of sports to how this love could be academically applied in a classroom. Graff ends the article by

Graff however does not provide any examples of how his teachers could have really done this. This makes his argument seem childish and not well thought out. If Graff had provided the reader with an example of how his teacher could have easily done this, the reader would be more inclined to agree with him. Graff features his love of sports using Sports Illustrated as an example along with books written by sports players. He goes on to tell the audience that he believes his desire to read books of a certain subject was not anti intellectual, just intellectual in a different way. This point is later brought up when he relates sports to intellectualism using examples such as “…challenging arguments, debates, problems for analysis, and intricate statistics that you could care about, as school conspicuously was not.” (Graff, 384). Within this Graff talks about learning the “…rudiments of intellectual life; how to make an argument, weigh different kinds of evidence, move between particulars and generalizations, summarize the view of others, and enter a conversation about ideas.” (Graff, 383). This point relies on assertion because he is making a statement without any facts and expecting the reader to believe him. Without facts of any kind his argument lacks any sort of authority. Had Graff provided statistics about kids using material they like to write academic papers and doing far better than traditional papers his claim would have been much more credible. Another part of Graff’s childhood that he discusses is how boys his age were divided into “…clean-cut boys like me and working class hoods…” (Graff, 382). He talks about how he struggled maintaining a balance between being smart and being tough. “I grew up then, between the need to prove I was smart and the fear of a beating if