Anti Intellectualism By Richard Hofstadter

“The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the "dumbing down" of America” is a editorial about the decrease importance in intellectuals. Anti-intellectualism is defined as a person who believes that intellect and reason are less important. This editorial was written by Ray Williams.

Graff states that, “In the dark, all intellectual disagreements are gray”(7). This displays that what people say and what people hear is vastly different. When there is a disagreement between two intellectuals in the same field, they “share a public language of ideas and arguments that transcends their ideological differences and separates them from many students and other Americans” (7). Therefore, when students hear these, they clearly experience a misunderstanding that can, and will not be understood unless these students experience the same intellectual thinking that these intellectuals

John Mearsheimer is an American professor of politology of the University of Chicago, was born on the 14th of December of 1947. John Mearsheimer is well-known among scholars as the author of a theory of offensive realism and his book “The Tragedy of Great Powers Politics”.

During the Scientific Revolution scientists such as Galileo, Copernicus, Descartes and Bacon wrestled with questions about God, human aptitude, and the possibilities of understanding the world. Eventually, the implications of the new scientific findings began to affect the way people thought and behaved throughout Europe. Society began to question the authority of traditional knowledge about the universe. This in turn, allowed them to question traditional views of the state and social order. No longer was the world constructed as the somewhat simple Ptolemaic Model suggested. The Earth for the first time became explicable and was no longer the center of the universe. Many beliefs that had been held for hundreds of years now proved to be

Leonid Fridman, author of "America Needs Its Nerds" wrote about how people who want to pursue their knowledge should be not be ashamed of that. Fridman develops his argument by talking about how other countries go about learning compared to the U.S, asking rhetorical questions, finding similarities between the different school/ education levels when it comes to the terms "nerd" and "geek".

“A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense” (Lukianoff and Haidt 44). Colleges are sheltering their students from words and ideas that students do not like or are found to be offensive. Affecting their education and cognitive skills, scientists are warning colleges to refrain from coddling the students and allowing other viewpoints to be spoken. People are speaking their minds, saying their own views; however, some people are over sensitive and take these viewpoints offensively. In the article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt successfully argues using rhetorical questions, specific examples, and affective visuals that protecting college students from words and ideas deteriorates their education and mental health.

Graff opens “Hidden Intellectualism” by presenting one of the piece’s three major points of focus. He states, “What doesn’t occur to us, though, is 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” (Graff 264). By introducing his argument as something that is commonly dismissed by a large group of people, he utilizes the writing template in They Say I Say for introducing what “they say” as a tool to keep the big

In “Hidden Intellectualism” by Gerald Graff, the author speaks about how schools should use students’ interests to develop their rhetorical and analytical skills. He spends a majority of his essay on telling his own experience of being sport loving and relating it to his anti-intellectual youth. He explains that through his love for sports, he developed rhetoric and began to analyze like an intellectual. Once he finishes his own story, he calls the schools to action advising them to not only allow students to use their interest as writing topics, but instead to teach the students on how to implement those compelling interests and present them in a scholarly way. In perspective, Graff’s argument becomes weak with his poor use of ethos, which he tries to build with his own anecdote but, through the same means he is able to build his pathos and in the last few paragraphs, with his use of logic he prevents his argument from becoming dismissible.

Cognitive distortions are said to be the ways in which our brain convinces us of something that is not true. College students experience cognitive distortions more often than none. The cognitive distortions in which college students experience would include the feeling of being a failure per not doing as well as you thought you did on a test, the rules we mentally make for ourselves, or negative global labeling. Cognitive distortions are believed to make us believe that information presented to us is rational and accurate when its goal is to make us continue to feel bad about ourselves. In the article, “The coddling of the American mind”, the authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt examines what they believe in the fact that professors are protecting students’ minds through warnings of offensive materials, which they believe encourages students to believe that it is damaging and dangerous to discuss certain aspects of our history (2015). College students endure these and many other cognitive distortions, but we are often made to believe that these distortions are acceptable simply because students’ minds are allowed to become more open to new ideas and new people due to the toning down of the perceptual state of mind to outrage and discomfort (Lukianoff & Haidt, 2015).

The general argument made by Gerald Graff in his essay “Hidden Intellectualism” is that, All people are intellectual but that intellectual side is hidden, People’s intellectual side usually emerge when they focus on things they are inquisitive in, maybe in academics or in sports as long as the person doing it is really passionate about it. More specifically, Graff argues that students in school should choose the subject that they believe will assist them and applicable to their skills because once they are force to study subject that is not relevant to what they want or they are not really interested in, they will just attend their class for a whole year without learning anything about it. That is because they are not willing to do it, their intellectual capacity will remain hidden for a long period of time. In addition the author writes, that “It was in these discussion with friends about toughness and sports, I think, and in my reading of sports books and magazine that I began to learn the rudiments of intellectual life”. This passage means that intellectual potential is not only gain by academic people, anyone can aquire it as long

In Gerald Graff’s story Hidden Intellectualism Graff, attests that intellect does not only exist in the scholarly form of thinking. Graff insists that knowledge can also take the form of "street smarts”. Graff uses personal experiences in his childhood to form his argumentative purpose. Graff tells about his disinterest in traditional academic subjects, and further elaborates on his love of sports. Being that he grew up in Chicago, Graff believes that academic knowledge is a delay in social world. Graff describes saddening story of growing up torn "between the need to prove I was smart and the fear of consequences if I prove too well." The conversation Graff brings to his audience attention with his friends helped develop the analysis, arguments,

The New York Times Poetry Pairing ‘The Properly Scholarly Attitude’ explores the idea of traditional schooling being suffocating to many students. Adelaide Crapsey’s poem “The Properly Scholarly Attitude” speaks of her feelings of resentment towards the expectations of society to learn a certain way. In the excerpt from the New York Times Article by Hanna Kozlowska about free play for children, she writes about a concept of learning called unschooling. In both pieces they suggest that traditional methods of education may not be the best for all children.

Nerds and athletes. Two different types of people that are treated differently. "America Needs its Nerds" by Leonid Fridman, Fridman believes that nerds should not be looked down upon. He compares both nerds and athletes, and compares that status to other countries. Fridman also includes rhetorical question for the reader to think about.

Jaded from seeing humanities uprisings first hand, he knows that they are nothing more than symptoms of an underlying disease. Because of his experience, he is able to see more deeply into the truth of American ideology, but he is unable to do much about it. As he says, “Once you figure out what a joke everything is, being the Comedian's the only thing that makes sense” (Moore and Gibson, Part 2, Pg. 13).

In Dwight MacDonald’s Reading and Though, he disagrees with Henry Luce’s Idea of functional curiosity. Luce coined the term “functional curiosity,” meaning “the kind of searching, hungry interest in what is happening everywhere.” MacDonald’s opinion of functional curiosity is that it only encourages practice in reading rather than giving beneficial information. He considers today’s literature as flimsy and overwhelming. MacDonald assumes that all reading done in today’s society is “shallow thinking.” I agree with MacDonald that there is a great amount of mediocre literature floating around, but he does not take into account the technological advancements, the lifestyles of people today, and students.