Blue-Collar Brilliance
...Although writers and scholars have often looked at the working class, they have generally focused on the values such workers exhibit rather than on the thought their work requires…Our cultural iconography promotes the muscled arm, sleeve rolled tight against biceps, but no brightness behind the eye, no image that links hand and brain....
American educator and author. Born to Italian immigrant parents in Altoona, Pennsylvania, Rose grew up in Los Angeles. Because of an administrative error at his high school, he was placed in the "vocational track" for academic underachievers; an alert teacher discovered the error, and Rose went on to excel as a student, earning his B.A. from Loyola University and a Ph.D. in education from UCLA. Rose has made a career of championing the academic potential of the poor and underprivileged. A teacher for forty years, he is presently a professor at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. His ten books include Lives on the Boundary (1989), which argues that poor preparation, not lack of intelligence, hampers most underachieving students, and The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker (2004). See also mikerosebooks.com. 