Compare And Contrast Blue Collar Brilliance Written By Rose And Hidden Intellectualism

M1: Education & Social Class Social class, more times than not, puts us into a group of people who share similar circumstances of wealth and power. Education factors into issues of wealth and power in complicated ways, and our location in a particular social class often shapes our expectations for schooling, its importance, and its potential for getting us to our goals for personal and professional success. Social class creates a divide in the education system and that divide affects the education a student of a lower class would receive compared to a student who comes from a higher class. In Blue – Collar Brilliance written by Rose and Hidden Intellectualism written by Graff, both authors use personal experience to contend how what social …show more content…
Both authors use personal examples showcasing how social class plays an impact on the education you receive or what society thinks you will receive. In the article Hidden Intellectualism, Graff makes many claims and uses personal experience as his primary source of evidence to derive from. He offers insight on his hatred for books growing up and goes on to talk about the neighborhood where he grew up. His block was entirely middle class but just a block over you could find, “…African Americans, Native Americans, and “hillbilly” whites who had recently fled post war joblessness in the South and Appalachia” (Graff 958). Graff provides insight into the wide variety of people he encountered in his town and how a line must be drawn between the varying social classes. He states, “On the one hand, it was necessary to maintain the boundary between the “clean – cut” boys like me and the working – class “hoods” as we called them…” (958). To Graff, education cannot be deciphered between “book smarts” and “street smarts.” The varying social classes where he grew up showcases how ones’ class can affect access to education. The groups who lived on the block next to Graff would be deemed as the lower status class and they were not expected to go to school and get an education like the middle class boys on Graff’s block. In a similar style to Graff, Rose uses personal experience, as well as the incorporation of his family members’ experiences to support his claim. From a recount on his Uncle Joe, as a reader you learn how Joe dropped out of school in the 9th grade to work on the Pennsylvania railroad, later went on to the navy, and eventually wound up as a supervisor at General Motors. In the article titled, Blue – Collar Brilliance written by Rose, one of the final lines he states was, “If we think that whole categories of people – identified by class or