Leonid Fridman's 'America Needs Its Nerds'

Freire was a proponent of the problem-posing method of teaching. This method relies on one 's metacognitive awareness. It is important for the student to know where they are in their understanding of the material. Further, this method of teaching encourages self-reflection in that a student thinks of how they are thinking. The problem-posing method encourages critical thinking whereas the banking concept does not.

In the American society, the exterior of a human has higher values than the interior. For instance, an athlete is held in high regard by the public, due to their aesthetically appealing body and the proficient ability to do physical activities. On the other hand, a nerd or geek is seen as an outcast in society, because of their intelligence. These uneven values of society are exactly what the founding member of the society of Nerds and Geeks at Harvard University, Leonid Fridman argues upon in his writing of “America Needs its Nerds.” Through the rhetorical strategies of tone, pathos, and rhetorical questioning, Fridman emphasizes the significance of intellectually driven people in America.

He goes onto explain that by talking about subjects such as sports, one is able to experience the topics of arguments, debates, and even statistics in a way that the subjects in school could not live up to. We see him talk about how everyday culture can be applied to the world much more than the topics and readings we learn about in school, as this culture is able to be talked about more enthusiastically with someone one had just met. Children would also be able to look at the world in a different light, as they would be learning essential life skills and essential knowledge in an interesting, exciting way. Graff faults the schooling systems for not being able to grasp his youthful attention, and the attention of so many of today’s children. Graff closes by saying that helping children find their intellectualism within themselves is still a work in progress.

The whole point of college is to get a degree and then go into the job market and be successful. How are kids supposed to get good grades when they don’t even care and just want to have fun? That’s why Edmundson stresses the fact that college really isn’t what it should be. There should be stricter regulations on getting good teachers forcing kids to learn. Students can still have fun and enjoy themselves but they also need to focus on school. After all where go to college to pay thousands of dollars and waste it away by doing bad academically.

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.

Freire shifts his focus to talk about the current consciousness state of the students. The consciousness of the students is the key to keeping them oppressed, by being able to change their consciousness it makes the students easier to control.

In any country, there are intellectual people who strive to gain as much knowledge and information as possible and there are athletes who only care about winning the game. However, in America, society values and idolizes the strong athletes over the scholarly bookworms. In “America Needs Its Nerds,” Leonid Fridman develops his idea about society’s inaccurate and flawed system of values through the use of description and examples, comparisons, and rhetorical questions.

In Gerald Graff’s Hidden Intellectualism, he argues nonacademic interests, writings, and discussions can possibly consider intellectualism because they can let one become an intellectual and transform his or her works into good academic. Here, he is also implying schools and colleges should encourage students to incorporate their nonacademic interests with academic study (Graff 250). In order to prove his claims are correct, he describes how discussions with his friends about sports and reading Sport magazine help him make an argument, summarize others’ opinions, and interact with the community (Graff 247). However, Graff’s readers will realize Graff fails to acknowledge not every people can relate themselves to sports. This is because there

Other countries treat the highly intelligent individuals with kindness and encouragement, unlike the U.S. which is one of the reasons why America has fallen behind a lot of other countries academically. Fridman also states that even at highly respected schools such as Harvard, many students don’t want to admit how much they study even to their friends. Those students don’t want anyone knowing how long they study because they don’t want people to think of them as nerds and geeks. While the nerds and geeks are the ones that are truly succeeding and actually want to learn.

Freire strongly disagrees with the “banking” concept of learning and he believes that it should not be used for education. Instead, he believes that the “problem posing” concept will let the students become a

My definition of a nerd defines a type of student who loves winter breaks because that is the time they can snuggle with a pleasant book or an internet article. If I can describe who I am, I would say that I am a student who enthusiastically uses her free time to learn.

The greatest thing about humans is that they have the ability to think. Thinking is what differs people from each other and makes people who they are. Freire understands the importance of thinking and wants to start a discussion on the school systems attempt to restrict thinking. This is what he tries to do in his article, something that he does pretty well. He believes the school system solely cares about facts and numbers. The teachers feed their students information and expect them to memorize it, and spit it back on paper. “The reason the banking system continues to thrive is to serve the purpose of the authority, whose peace of mind rests on how well the oppressed fit in the world created by the oppressors, and how little they question it (Freire, page 219). Educators have to understand that the classroom is a leveled playing field, teaching and learning simultaneously through discussions with each other.

Only in the end of his essay does Freire focus more on his own system, and explain its privileges without resorting to the faults of the currents system, but even then he uses the latter tactic several times. The essay ends on a political note, calling the new revolutionaries to realize what the name they call themselves means, and to change the current ways not only on the outside, as they have done before, but also internally to make radical changes to their philosophy and their ideas about education. This concluding device stirs up some doubts as to the point of the whole essay. It might seem from the author’s concluding point that the underlying purpose of the essay was not to expand on the more beneficial ways of education, but to criticize the ways of political leaders in his, or some other country. Nevertheless, the rest of the essay shows little evidence of such a plot, and this point is at best marginal.

“Perhaps the most obvious cause of anti-intellectual tendencies, harmful social stereotypes begin to emerge as early as in high school. The idea of the “geek” or “nerd” of the

At any school, the athletes are put on a peddle stool and the smart kids barely get any recognition from the school. According to Grant Penrod this is the problem with schools and the students at the school. This is seen as a problem because of the younger generation at school. Grant Penrod wrote this essay at Arizona State University and it won second place in the Printer’s Devil Contest (759). This author is writing towards high school or college students about problems at school. Penrod begins to build his credibility with facts from websites, statements people have made online, percentages, and emotional content to make the reader feel emotion. Towards the end of the article Penrod includes a quote from a student that is considered a nerd. Penrod wrote this essay to inform the audience about how nerds are looked at as being intellectualism and how other students look down at that.