Concealed Commitment

In "Hidden Intellectualism" Gerald Graff (2001) addresses a challenge many teachers face on an almost daily basis: row after row of glassy-eyed students who see little reason that they should care to discuss or read the books their teachers seem to love. To Graff, the problem is not so much that students lack the necessary fire in the belly when it comes to matters intellectual as that teachers often fail to make good use of the intellectual fires students already have going. Consequently, teachers should get in the habit of recognizing the hidden intellectualism in students' routine arguments about such commonplace matters as baseball or who's the toughest guy in the school.

As far as it goes, Graff's argument for argument has great pedagogical promise, but it would have even greater force if he described with more consistency the reasons teachers, students, and democratic society should make a commitment to it. In its current form "Hidden Intellectualism" can be read either as an ingenious way to trick students into playing the kind of game academics like to play (for the students' benefit, to be sure) or as a more radical effort to democratize the power structures both in the academy and in the culture at large (for the benefit of the communities we live in as much as for the benefit of individual students). The latent tension between these different readings and the different reasons for them, compatible though they might be, is nevertheless unsettling.

According to Graff, teachers tend to ignore the intellectualism of students who (1) have interests not traditionally seen as academic (e.g., cars, sports, and fashion trends), or (2) fail to use academic discourse to articulate their interests (e.g., "criticizing something by saying 'it sucks'" [35]), or (3) adhere to a belief system traditionally seen as anti-intellectual (e.g., Pentecostal Christianity). Rather than instinctively identify students' "philistine" pursuits, nonacademic language, and/or ostensibly anti-intellectual worldviews as proofs of their distaste for intellectualism, Graff believes that teachers should consciously strive to ignite the latent intellectualism smoldering beneath the book-hating surface.

In Graff's eyes, we're all intellectuals; it's just that some of us don't know it yet. He actually believes that, as his incredulous student critic T. E. put it, "Every gum-chewing high school kid who has ever been caught criticizing something by saying 'it sucks' could be an English major" (35). Consequently, Graff wants teachers to make use of the fact that any student who advances an argument, stakes a claim, offers evidence, and/or responds to counterarguments is involved at some fundamental level in the same kinds of practices that academics and other public leaders employ all the time, whether the student is discussing tattoos, baseball teams, or movie stars. He thinks that it is crucial for teachers to communicate to students the inherent value of such argument, its usefulness to students who want to be successful in society, and the similarity between street-smart student versions of argument and the formalized versions of "real" intellectuals, public figures, and higher academics. "My schools missed the opportunity to capitalize on the gamelike element of drama and conflict that the intellectual world shares with the world of sports," Graff writes (28), describing how the intellectual dimensions of his adolescent enthusiasm for baseball were ignored by his teachers. Today's schools, he vows, must not let similar opportunities pass them by.

This sales pitch packs a powerful punch. Graff's pedagogy is definitely something you can use in your class on Monday morning. If your students care about anything--the lives of the rich and famous, the lives of the young and beautiful, the Holy Gospel, Raw Is War--you can get them to argue about it. And if you can get them to argue about it, you can prove that they are intellectuals, since making arguments is, as Graff tells us, what intellectuals do. And once you've got students believing that they are intellectuals because they make arguments, it's...