[lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?

[Carrol Cox]

On the '60s. Ted Benton has published a book, "What Really Happened to the
> 1960s: How Mass Media Culture Failed American Democracy." Ted (who I
became acquainted with on the sixties list) tells me in an off-list post
that the verb "failed" was not his but forced on him by the publisher! I've
got a grad student coming Tuesday to start reading it to me, & it will
probably make up most of my posting on this list (or so I hope)l Chojsky is
wholly correct, to the letter and detail, on what the '60s were and how
they've been treated. (Well, he should focus on _both_ book wriets and the
media)). Anyone who thinks Chomsky wrong on that is seriously ignorant of a
crucial period in U.S. history. Ted wrote me about his book after I had
posted one of my occasional explosions on the '60s list. The list has been
dead for years, but The Moderator keeps up a steady flow of forwards from
the media that mention the '60s. I started my post on something he had
forward with the statement that any text on the '60s which mentions either
hippies or weatherman in the first paragraph is almost certainly a tissue
ofl lies. And I have heard very sincere and well-intentioned historians,
thing to praise the 't0s, spout out the same tissue of leis. Some of those
lies about the Panthers have been frequently echoed on this list and the
Marxism list.

I think I just got by the tail a sense of what Chomsky means by the word
"intellectual." I'm going to think about it and I hope post on it.

If you want to know the '60s, get Ted's book.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Angelus Novus
Sent: Friday, February 04, 2011 1:37 PM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?

Carroll wrote:


> Human learning approaches infinity. Part of it will, usually, for 
> younger workers (in and out of school) consists of what will and what 
> won't help them in their particular goals. 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. 

Here's a relevant quote from Chomsky:

See, the idea that people could be free is extremely frightening to any¬body
with power. That's why the 1960s have such a bad reputation. I mean, there's
a big literature about the Sixties, and it's mostly written by
intellectuals, because they're the people who write books, so naturally it
has a very bad name-because they hated it. You could see it in the faculty
clubs at the time: people were just traumatized by the idea that students
were suddenly asking questions and not just copying things down. In fact,
when people like Allan Bloom [author of The Closing of the American Mind]
write as if the foundations of civilization were collapsing in the Sixties,
from their point of view that's exactly right: they were. Because the
foundations of civilization are, "I'm a big professor, and I tell you what
to say, and what to think, and you write it down in your notebooks, and you
repeat it." If you get up and say, "I don't understand why I should read
Plato, I

 think it's nonsense," that's destroying the foundations of civilization.
But maybe it's a perfectly sensible question-plenty of philosophers have
said it, so why isn't it a sensible question? 

As with any mass popular movement, there was a lot of crazy stuff going on
in the Sixties-but that's the only thing that makes it into history: the
crazy stuff around the periphery. The main things that were going on are out
of history-and that's because they had a kind of libertarian character, and
there is nothing more frightening to people with power. 


>From the book "Understanding Power"

      

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