“Hidden Intellectualism” by Gerald Graff

Gerald Graff, author of the passage “Hidden intellectualism” expresses the idea that schools and colleges educate academic subjects too narrowly. Also, Graff explains why students are not able to apply focus to academic work. Teachers and professors educate students on subjects that is intellectual and overlook on how to maintain a student’s focus on school work. Graff goes on to say a student who is viewed as “street smarts” is viewed as anti-intellectual but has hidden intellectualism. Teachers are not focusing on how to change a student’s “street smarts” in academic work.  In addition, Graff believes educators can achieve focus on students by applying anti-intellectualism subjects such as TV, sports, and dating and turning them into intellectual subjects to maintain the focus of a student.

If an educator learns that anti-intellectual subjects can be intellectual, students would be more in tuned to school work and encourage a student to progress in education.

In the passage, Graff introduces his personal experience with anti-intellectualism. Graff says that as a child he hated books and only cared for sports. His main focus was on reading sports magazines and not books or doing school work. Graff states that his main focus was not anti-intellectual but intellectual. In addition, Graff expresses his childhood. Whereas people who were seen as openly book smart were called “clean-cut” and people who were “hoods” was seen as tuff guys.

Graff needed the approval from the hoods in order to stop getting beat up. Which stopped him from becoming intellectual and focus more on hiding being book smart.In the passage, Graff explains in the 1950s people were not so hatred towards intellectualism but, in favor of it. Which led Graff to realize that he had been practicing intellectualism in the past. In addition, Graff found that the countless debates with friends over tv, sport, and who was the toughest, were educating him on intellectualism. The debates taught Graff about how to construct a counter-argument also new writing ideas he still uses in the present.Later in the passage, Graff describes how street smarts composes of a better intellectual topic rather than schools.

Graff goes on to say, that schools fail to catch student’s attention because of dull topics, unlike sports. Graff believes that sports are intellectual debates and organized as the real work itself. In addition, Graff believes that schools miss the chance to capture excitement and drama in educational subjects, unlike sports encourage a student to focus more. Graff implies that schools tend to fail at joining a self-interesting topic to an academic one.At the end of the passage, Graff closes his argument implying that in order to maintain a student’s focus in school work, educators must assign topics more relatable and interesting academics subject. Also, Graff implies that if a student can work with more interesting topics, the student can later on progress with writing more up-scaling academic topics. In addition, Graff states if this is correct, students who are street smart can achieve a higher education for themselves.

Also, students will be able to learn from their own academic eyes. In addition, create a solution towards the learning process in other school and colleges.