Critical thinking, NOT the kind of basic problem solving the report and most standardized tests test, is the capacity for to situate one's politicized social self-reflexivity in historical and global context and to always imagine that social problems need to be solved socially. I don't know about your students but mine arrive at college and usually leave with an ahistorical, anti-political, parochial, xenophobic and instrumental consciousness which deeply inhibits their willingness to be more literate, much less read, watch, listen or converse on issues that might discomfit them.
I'd be the last person to argue that colleges and universities are, or ever have been, especially concerned with the kinds of literacy or critical thinking above... but that doesn't mean that there aren't more folks in universities with an interest in promoting these things than outside, not that the socialization and education student receive before college doesn't usually militate against developing these capacities. Now, you're surely correct that the social changes necessary to foster different orientations to literacy and critical thinking can not and are not going to start in schools or universities but that doesn't mean that conditions which fundamentally impede teaching effectively in a manner informed by the materialist conception of history aren't real, nor that they are not a problem.
On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 11:30 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> I wish someone would explain carefully what "literacy" means in this
> context.
>
> And I am also wondering whether the critical thinking so lacking isn't in
> fact a rather (at least in potential) desirable lack. Could someone say why
> more "critical thinking" for a larger percentage is necessarily a desirable
> or useful trait. I seriously doubt that whatever scholars (those who made
> the study) call critical thinking is very useful (socially or personally).
>
> Carrol
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
> On Behalf Of SA
> Sent: Friday, February 04, 2011 7:17 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?
>
> On 2/4/2011 7:26 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>
> >
> > On Fri, 4 Feb 2011, SA wrote:
> >
> >> So it's not surprising that the younger cohort has higher literacy
> >> scores than the older cohort - a pattern that exists in every country
> >> in the OECD study. What's surprising is how limited the increase was
> >> from one generation to the next. The increase is much greater in
> >> every other OECD country. In the US, the younger cohort's scores are
> >> +20 points lower than they would have been if the (very regular)
> >> pan-OECD pattern had played out in the US.
> >
> > Forgive me if this has been asked before, but is it possible this was
> > because the US was starting out from a higher literacy base?
>
> It's true that the US "started out" (figuratively speaking) as one of
> the higher-literacy countries, generally behind only the Scandinavians.
> But then the Scandinavians experienced much larger increases than the
> US. For example, the 5 countries that "started out" higher than the US
> on the Quantitative test had an average score increase of 28 points, vs.
> 11 points for the US. More generally, while there was a tight
> relationship between a country's young-cohort scores and old-cohort
> scores (r-squared ~ 80%), there wasn't so much of a relationship between
> a country's "initial" score and the size of its subsequent increase
> (r-squared ~ 30%). So that can't explain it.
>
> SA
>
>
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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319