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

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Feb 5 16:30:18 PST 2011


Eric Beck: Capitalism requires free subjects, or at least formally free ones. It's just hat its negatively defined idea of freedom sucks.

Though I think it's wrong to think of this freedom as ideological, or as merely ideological.

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Some Tentative Thoughs

Your second alternative is correct in both instances: _formally_ free & _not merely_ ideological. And it is important to place that formal freedom in the context of Marx's emphasis, variously expressed, on the "dot-like isolation of the _merely_ [my emphasis] free worker in bourgeois society." (Quoted from memory) And it seems devilishly even for leftists who agree with Marx on this actually to escape it as an assumption whenever it is not itself the center of the discussion. The 'worry' about what college students are or are not learning seems to depend upon an assumption that all political movement must arise from the free choice of isolated individuals, motivated purely by their intelligence and learning to attach themselves to "progressive" causes. On any other assumption the discussion would _begin_ not with polls or tests (which are always grounded in the isolated action of isolated individuals but with the fact that stares one in the face: that the primary function of schools has always been to gather young people together in temporary separation from the larger society. Whatever of substance results from the educational system is first and last the result of interactions among those so brought together.

Now the _effects_ of the NCLB and Obama's Race to the Top as well as of the attacks on teachers, is to break up this gathering of young by separating them from each other in the bubbles of test-taking and test-preparation. In so far as this is successful it will seriously disrupt the only significant collective experience of young workers (or students) in the U.S. And this whole discussion has passively gone along with this assumption that what students do _in isolation_ from one another is the basis for judging u.s. education. (A guess: the alleged greater success of EU education, if true, is a symptom of the growing triumph of neoliberalism there.) Now the greater world of capitalist competition and the isolation of the merely free worker _usually_ dissipates this collective experience in school. BUT NOT ALWAYS. And that is why for over a century, in nation after nation, one of the 'hotbeds' of insurrectionary thought has been in the schools. It is worth noting here, perhaps, that what brought down the full force of repression on the Panthers was their Breakfast Program, designed to create a collective experience for black youngsters and to make school itself a more welcome experience. Hunger is isolating.) "Critical Thought," incidentally, is _also_ an isolating experience, an intellectual or pseudo-intellectual process within the isolated head of the isolated test-taker.

And in answer to what is the cause of the lagging of u.s. education, I would suggest it is the remnants of collective experience in u.s. schools. It is a mark of the what is still right about u.s. schools, not a mark of failure. And the present attack on the schools threatens even those remnants of what has been the best features of u.s. education.

Carrol



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