> College students, like everyone else, are constantly learning (and
> studying)
> all matter of things... that their views and the views of their professors
> or of
> other students vary considerably... about their school's athletic
> program...
[or] to gamble or how to control or not control
> alcohol.... Any discussion of what students do and
> don't study is permeated by innumerable implicit 'value' judgments. Any
> discussion that does not uncover and debate those value judgments is sorely
> lacking in critical thinking.
>
> Carrol
>
What values undergird your position, Carrol, that four to six years of learning your capacity for drink, learning to let the leaders of your Greek organization do what they want, learning that learning sucks, learning about history, politics, economics, culture, society, engineering, math and nature is effectively valueless and learning that anyone who cares about these things isn't engaged in anything meaningful or of potential consequences but is just a royal pain in the ass.
There's no one here who's reifying book learning, the western canon, or the statistical analysis of microbiophysical chemical interactions. There's no one here who's uncritical of the embedded conservatism within institutions of American public and higher education. There's no one here who's unaware of the historical elitism and inanity of traditional knowledge-for-knowledge's sake approaches, much less anyone here uncritical of the idea that college provides students with the kinds of critrical historical, philosophical, political and cultural knowledge to be good citizens or that it is alternatively about presenting students with the cutting edge scientific and technological knowledge.
What values undergird your ongoing denigration of any teacher's commitment to the idea that sharing their knowledge might - however indirectly or contingently - prove useful to their students, or even - by presenting them with aspects of or previously inaccessible means of interpreting the world about which they have no knowledge - possibly opening (future?) cracks in the ahistorical, parochial, xenophobic, presociological, and anti-intellectual norms and values with which they have been (sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally) socialized. Is there really going to be social movements that you're in the slightest bit likely to have any appreciation of in a world where greater than half of college graduates have vocabularies weaker than I had in 7th grade? in a world where the idea that a systematically researched, peer reviewed and well-edited academic monograph is not different than a novel? in a world, therefore, where the difference between scientific analysis (and no, I do not hold to high modern functionalist positions on what science is and isn't), literary fiction and political polemic is opaque? Do you believe so little in the academy that you've utterly rejected the idea that there's any value in presenting cultural, social and natural analyses in ways that implicitly or explicity present the materialist conception of history?
What values lie beneath your seeming rejection of the idea that there is anything of value in the efforts of critical faculty to teach, engage and encourage students to see the world differently and actively engage it on terms beyond their immediate ken, experience and imagination? What values reside within your perpetual assumption that anyone who's done any teaching on this list hasn't thought extensively about the issues you repeatedly raise? If your sense is that whatever happens in college is acceptible learning and studying, on what grounds do you argue that it is incumbent on those of us on the left to unequivocally support ALL teachers? You're arguments here could easily be appropriated by those seeking to further discipline or simply eliminate faculty - especially of the tenure stream variety - because students in their college years learn plenty without us... you're certainly not showing any support for the teachers here.