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

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Feb 5 17:15:36 PST 2011


Alan Rudy

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

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Andy, with all due respect, this is the most anti-leftist nonsense I have ever heard coming from a leftists. It could not be accepted by anyone who has ever been seriously involved in political organizing around left issued. A left that depends on recruiting and organizing only or mostly isolated individuals who have achieved this sort of freakish independence is no left at all. Even Wojtek knows this (though he often forgets it). He recently pointed out a profound that lies at the basis of all growth of mass movements: recruitment to such movements is through personal acquaintance with participants in it. Rosa Parks did not ignite a near revolution by thinking critically; she did so by manifesting in her thought and action the accumulated experience of NAACP chapters in the U.S. (In the late '40s C.L.R. James recognized the rapid growth of NAACP local chapters and on that basis predicted the coming of a mass social movement.) And of course many took place in that total movement who were barely literate by any standards. But such "illiterate" people were important members even of study groups focusing on highly complex texts: they wanted to learn and members of the group who were 'highly' literate were anxious to share with them and everyone learned. A personal boast is necessary here: I am fucking brilliant at dreaming up tactics: BUT I have never proposed a tactic which was not improved (sometimes over my doubts) through group discussion and amendment, usually involving people not very literate by pig standards.

This does not in the least downplay the crucial importance of theorists (which is what people usually mean by "intellectuals") in any mass movement. Their presence is essential to raise to a level of theory the collective experiences of the struggle. I would hazard a guess that what Chomsky means, or at least ought to mean, by his use of the term "intellectual," is highly literate and mentally alert men and women who do not recognize that theory flows from practice, never the other way around. Had Marx been born 20 years sooner we would never have had _Capital_ or the _Grudrisse_ to quote to one another, because he would not have had the intellectual context, the rising of the proletariat even in embryonic form, to direct his attention. He too might instead have babbled about "solving" social "problems." Such solutions are the problem of the capitalists and their think tanks, not of a left focused on transforming the context in which those "problems" escape from the arithmetic textbook out into the world.

Carrol



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