Book smarts with intellectualism and street smarts with anti-intellectualism - Essay Example

By agreeing with his premise, this student will retrace Graff’s logic and provide a level of external analysis that will provide the reader with a more informed understanding and logical progression with respect to how Graff’s transformation took place. Firstly, before delving directly subject matter, it must be understood that scholars and societal stakeholders alike oftentimes to distance intellectualism from anti-intellectualism. It is without question that there is tension and strife between these two points of view; with both intellectuals and anti-intellectuals being distrustful, spiteful, and downright cruel to one another.

Lunch has with regards the way in which individuals of different classes have separated themselves, lunch in the same way that individual races have been sidelined within American society, Graff argues the fact that intellectualism has separated itself from anti-intellectualism, and vice versa, to such a degree that these two distinct groups have come to an even further level of conflict within the current world. However, these social constraints aside, it is clear and apparent that the similarity that exists between these two groups is greater than the dissimilarity that they purport to espouse (Fridlan 890).

For instance, Graff represents the early childhood disagreements, arguments, and disputes that he had with fellow adolescents in his youth. Instead of serving as mindless and un-intellectual banter, as many might assume, these levels of argumentation encouraged and coaxed the stakeholders into providing a level of substantiation, facts, and representative understanding with respect to the position that they espouse. Although they most certainly did not understand it at the time, the need to substantiate their beliefs and promote a level of understanding concerning their points of view was