Blue Collar Brilliance, By The Belgian Constitutional Court

The story “Blue-Collar Brilliance” by Mike Rose, was originally published in the American Scholar, in 2009. Rose is an American education scholar and was born in 1944. Rose has written several articles on literacy matters. He studied the struggle of the working-class America. Throughout the article, Rose used personal stories to persuade the reader blue-collar workers are very intelligent despite having a formal education. Rose’s agenda could be compared to that of Aristotle regarding their similar ideas on persuasion. Aristotle, was a well-known Greek philosopher, implemented three key terms: ethos, pathos, and logos to persuade his audience. Much like Aristotle, the author of Blue-Collar Brilliance, portrays the importance of his mother and uncle’s jobs by them showing intuition, intelligence, and multitasking thus demonstrating ethos, pathos, and logos.

In “Blue Collar Brilliance” Mike Rose starts of by telling us two stories, one about his mother and the other about his uncle Joe. They worked what people would call blue collar jobs; everybody usually perceives blue collar jobs as grunt work which doesn’t take much intelligence to work. However Rose disagrees with that notion; Rose describes to us in detail how his moms’ intellect in the restaurant work field kept the place calm, efficient and balanced. He also told us a story of how his uncle Joe worked up the ranks of the auto industry after dropping out of school in the ninth grade. One of Rose’s main points in “Blue Collar Brilliance” is that intelligence isn’t always measured with grades and tests and, that blue collar jobs take just

Income during the 2000’s: The nation suffered through a weak job market in the 2000s. Jobs grew only 0.6% during the period, which wasn't enough to keep up with the growing population, the EPI said. As a result, there were 1.5 million more unemployed workers. one in 11 workers were underemployed in the 2000s, as they were looking for full-time work but had to take part time jobs. Workers' hours were cut by 2.2% in the 2000s, which negated the median family's 1% rise in hourly wages. (

In the article “Blue-Collar Brilliance”, Mike Rose’s main focus was to convey that there are forms of intelligence than just being intellectual. Rose, suggest that a broader perspective of education allow us to expand our understanding of what intelligence is. Rose explains what our culture views as intelligence: “Our cultural iconography promotes the muscled arm; sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no brightness behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain” (Rose). In making this comment, Rose urges us to take a step back and to look society’s perception of blue-collar work as not as demanding or requiring as much brain powering as white-collar work. Often people do not realize that a person who has a blue-collar job is just as

Mike Rose has spent most of his life watching those defined as “blue-collar” workers with much appreciation. He would watch his mother, Rosie, and his uncle, Joe, work to their fullest potential with skills he had never really seen anywhere else except in their “blue-collar” world. Mike believes that the way his family worked, as well as others considered “blue-collar”, are intelligent in their own ways and are underappreciated compared to the way he sees them.

In the article, "Blue Collar Brilliance" Mark Rose shows his thought that hands on employments shouldn't be seen as foolish. Society characterizes knowledge in view of grades and IQ tests, however numbers doesn't characterize the workers in the fields. Rose points out that his mom's employment as a waitress and his uncle's occupation in the paint-and-body office are two individuals with a less education is skillful in their job by gaining hand-on experience and knowledge.

Rose continues to bring other blue-collar job that requires similar ability and to explain we only try to measure intelligence solely on grades in school and their intelligence at this level. However, he argues that blue-collar intelligence goes far from what we usually can perceive. He ends his argument we the following statement: “If we believe everyday work to be mindless, then that will affect the work we create in the future. When we devalue the full range of everyday cognition, we offer limited educational opportunities and fail to make fresh and meaningful instructional connections among disparate kinds of skill and knowledge. If we think that the whole categories of people—identified by class or occupation---are not that bright, then we reinforce social separations and cripple our ability to talk across cultural divides” (Rose, 2015, p283). In my view, Rose made a very good argument about how Blue-Collar workers are labelled in many cases as intelligence, but he ends this argument by basically said that those who may can to that conclusion are not that smart. If you think about everything, that Rose describes in this essay

Blue Collar workers as the fundamental that makes up America. One such man, author Mike Rose a professor at UCLA, who wrote "Blue-Collar Brilliance," published in a reputable magazine in 2009 in the American Scholar, what Rose argues, is that blue-collar workers often overlooked. In effect, that the establishment of where you work acts as an institution of learning and those without a formal education have valuable types of "brilliance." Rose argues his claim by using pathos, logos through personal stories, credentials, and comprehensive counterarguments.

In the U.S society, there is a distinguishment between the different classification of employment. Those categories of employment are either classified as “blue-collar” or “white-collar”. Blue-collar jobs are referred to the line of employment that require manual labor such as factory workers and truck drivers, as for the white-collar jobs require high skills and higher education such as doctors and lawyers (Chambliss and Eglitis 159). Although, the professions are labeled as blue or white collar through its needs, the different labels indicates one’s position in the ranks. Each rank is often associated with characteristic that either make them upper class or lower class. Furthermore, “people’s life experience and opportunities are powerfully influenced by how their social category is ranked”(Chambliss and Eglitis 159). Therefore, one’s lifestyle depends on which category they fall into within the rank. That being the case, journalist Alfred Lubrano wrote the book, Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams, which describes the cultural conflict experienced by white-collar professionals that grew up in blue-collar homes. It tells readers how the white-collar professionals found it difficult to apply to their blue-collar families, due to the fact, that they often held values and engaged in behaviors that apply to the upper-class. As in order to fit in within the groups, they would have to adapt to the upper class life. So the transition from a blue-collar life to a

In his article he talks about how blue-collar work is a very unstable job to have. There are long hours and small pay checks at the end of the day. He tells us that another thing to worry about when working a blue-collar job, is one day not having your job at all. He makes this statement, “The most stressful thing about blue-collar life is knowing your job could disappear overnight.” He proves this statement with an example from one of the factories he was working at.”

The essay "The Case for Working with Your Hands" which is taken from Matthew B. Crawford’s book "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work", provides a great topic of discussion of supporting the middle class blue-collar economy in this era. Matthew discusses the economics of the working class and highlights the benefits in comparison to the typical nine to five office job. He breaks down the basis of each, sharing his own personal experience and utilizes his own viewpoint to build his stance towards that side. He also took a stance to prove that the systematic logic of cognitive thinking that blue collar careers are degrading and are not an ideally professionalism is actually an incorrect outdated viewpoint. In his own words "Ultimately it is enlightened self-interest, then, not a harangue about humility or public-spiritedness,

In my observation mentally with Mr. Roses essay on blue collar brilliance, Mr Rose tries to tell the reader on the different levelsof work there is for high educated people opposed to the non educated. Furthermore he tries express through his family experiences in the work environment how a person with a manual labor is not so different than a person with a high level of education, they are equal in job to job views but not in society.

There is a Chinese proverb that says, “ Those who say it can not be done, should not interrupt those doing it.” Steve Olson wrote an essay that talks about that very principle. He titled his essay “Year of the Blue-Collar Guy.” It is about the hard working blue collar guys (BCGs) living in America. Steve Olson is a writer that does not have the usual degrees, awards or publications. Though he has written several books, he says that he is a construction worker. He writes for the average American, so what is Olsen’s purpose in writing about BCGs? To accomplish his purpose I looked at what kind of modes of persuasion he uses, how he responds to the arguing side of his point, and what logical fallacies he uses.

There are many different ways to interpret the inequality in the economy, some of which are: It could simply be a fluke that inequality rose suddenly for many years’ prior the crisis, or high inequality could by some means create economic weaknesses. The frankest explanation for the connection between inequality and the crisis is what some call the demand gap. There are many differences of this thought, but at its fundamental core is the disagreement that most Americans, suffering from unchanging earnings, couldn’t manage to pay for everything they required to just barely survive.

Dufour. M. & Orhangazi, O. (June, 2014). Capitalism, Crisis, and Class: The United States Economy after the 2008 Financial Crisis. Sage Journals, 46(4) 469-470. Retrieved from http://rrp.sagepub.com.ezproxy.bu.edu/content/46/4/461