Gerald Graff Hidden Intellectualism Analysis

Gerald Graff’s Hidden Intellectualism Summary

If someone asked you which was more important, street smarts or book smarts, what would be your answer? Gerald Graff, the author of an essay called Hidden Intellectualism, contemplates on what he thinks because there are pros and cons to being street smart and being book smart.

Graff was always caught between the two, feeling the need to be both. Growing up in the 1950’s, there was a fine line between the hoods and the clean cuts. Graff was naturally smart but he did not know it yet. The hoods in his neighborhood would push him around if he ever came across as being smart. As a result, Graff claims “I grew up torn then between the need to prove I was smart and the fear of a beating if I proved it too well . . .”

Perhaps proving it is what he should’ve done. We all know the 1950’s were a changing era and when Marilyn Monroe divorced baseball star Joe DiMaggio and then married playwright Arthur Miller, this opened Graff’s eyes. Realizing that someone like Marilyn Monroe chose a geek over a jock, or in other words, a book smart instead of a street smart, Graff thought maybe things were changing. As if that wasn’t enough to change his mind, Elvis seems to have supported a book smart during the 1956 presidential election.

For more of a street smart point of view, Graff came to understand that sports were more convincing than school.

How? Graff says it perfectly, “I believe that street smarts beat out book smarts in our culture not because street smarts are nonintellectual, as we generally suppose, but because they satisfy an intellectual thirst more thoroughly than school culture, which seems pale and unreal.” What he is saying is that students should be taught something perhaps that they’d actually want to learn. Graff understands students need to know math and how to speak correctly, but he feels students should have the opportunity to learn things they care

about.
In all, Graff still contemplates on his upbringing argument. Which is better and which is worse? It could all be a matter of opinion but as Graff finishes off his essay, he says something that seems to get teachers united, “Give me the student anytime who writes a sharply argued, sociologically acute analysis of an issue in Source over the student who writes a lifeless explication of Hamlet or Socrates Apology.”