I am a fan of good questions (of course!). I just picked up Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe, and right away, some good questions:
…schooling takes students who are perfectly street-smart and exposes them to the life of the mind in ways that make them feel dumb. Why is this? Why in many cases do street smarts not only fail to evolve naturally into academic smarts, but end up seeming opposed to academic smarts, as if the two can’t coexist inside the same head? (2)
Excellent questions! Why is it that punk music isn’t valued as good criticism in the same way Foucault is? (tehe, some self serving here because I want to use punk as theory.)
Graff, Gerald. Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.
Well, this is exactly what I need to share with my composition class. One student just wrote a paper on street smarts versus book smarts. Maybe I should make this the topic for their discussion board post during conference week.
Graff really understands the dilemma – same thing that Mike Rose says, only different.