Anti-Intellectualism: Why We Hate The Smart Kids By Grant Penrod

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Nerds need love too In “Anti-intellectualism: Why We Hate the Smart Kids,” Grant Penrod believes that high schools do not give the same recognition to the academic clubs and intellectual students then the sports teams. He thinks this because at a high school in Arizona a football team won a state title and was recognized through state banners, assemblies, and a video announcement in their honor. While the Science Bowl Team, Speech and Debate team, and the Academic Decathlon team also won state titles the same year. For the academic teams, there recognition was about ten minutes at a sports assembly, even though the debate team brought Arizona its first national title. Grant believes in a theory called Anti-intellectualism, which …show more content…
The image the media makes about the success stories of people are usually the high school dropouts and college dropouts that go on and make fortunes. Then there is little recognition for the intelligent people who go on and become successful, wealthy, or powerful citizens. There is also a growing number of athletes and singers who are college dropouts that are now millionaires, this shows that being intelligent isn’t the only way to become wealthy. Even though these stories are the ones that the media makes the biggest deals the census bureau says,” People holding doctorates degrees earned more than twice the salary of high school graduates.” Grant believes dropouts and unintelligent people don’t deserve as much recognition because they aren’t as smart. He even criticizes George W. Bush because in high school he was only a C student throughout his academic career. Grant even said, “... reflects rather poorly on the regard in which most Americans hold intelligence.” This quote represents that Grant thinks that people who hold the power of the US should be smart; and that the American public does not make decisions strictly on intelligence. The public's decisions come from what they see through the media and that the media shames the intelligent people which is how …show more content…
In my opinion, it’s not because of anti-intellectualism in my experiences I think that high school students are more intrigued and entertained by sports than academic clubs. I agree with the author that academic clubs do deserve more respect and recognition from the high schools, I think that the administrators don’t understand the actual hard work and skill that goes into academic clubs. Grant says,” nerds are excluded from social activity because of their label…” I think that is very inaccurate because in my experiences I’ve never not included someone or seen someone not included because of their intelligence, maybe they aren’t as involved sporting events due to the fact they spend more time and care more about school then sports. As a high school student, I’ve never experienced the hatred of intelligent people if anything I think there almost looked up to. I think that today being intelligent is gift, I don’t think there’s too many people in the world that hate intelligent people. I think being intelligent is a characteristic that people dream of wanting because there such a high demand for students to finish school and move on to earn a degree. I think you can consider the social norm in the US is to be intelligent. It is a characteristic people now look for in a partner or they try to push their children and family to be smart. The only

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