Carrol
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: The future of plagiarism Date: Mon, 24 Jun 2002 10:38:15 -0500 From: Susan Kalter <smkalte at ILSTU.EDU> Reply-To: Susan Kalter <smkalte at ILSTU.EDU> To: ENGDEP-L at listserv.ilstu.edu
It's amazing to me how this woman tries to mask an elitist contempt for student intelligence in a heroic rhetoric of anti-establishment-arianism and property-rights iconoclasm. No doubt there is an argument that our culture's concepts of intellectual property derive directly from the rise of capitalism and a hypocritically implemented hallowing of private property. Yet it is conceivable, and has been argued in certain venues, that ideas of intellectual property do not arise solely in capitalist economies but may and have arisen in noncapitalist economies.
I question whether this woman has ever run into a student who has intellectually impoverished him or herself by plagiarizing. Instead, she makes the term encompass so much that she erases very important distinctions between students and scholars who gratefully acknowledge that "the creation of new knowledge" is a collective endeavor and those few who cheat themselves (and coast by on the labor of others) by copying words they do not understand. I thought that Marxists scholars were supposed to be committed to democratizing education, not to facilitating the superficial acquisition of the trappings of education without the accompanying understanding of what they have "learned."
And, by the way, does she really believe that the banking model of education is the norm in 99% of the classrooms? I would like to see this imaginary "statistic" backed up with real evidence.
At 12:00 AM 06/24/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>Date: Sun, 23 Jun 2002 18:50:55 -0500
>From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ILSTU.EDU>
>Subject: [Fwd: Re: The future of plagiarism]
>
>instances of it would be easier to prosecute. So, endless hours of
>twattle
>trying to figure out how to combine the requirement for originality with
>the reality that maybe 1% of our students had the capacity to do
>anything
>original and with the other reality that 99% of instruction focused on
>making them learn and regurgitate ideas developed by others.......
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