> 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
> ======
>
> 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.
...SNIP...
Carrol:
You are exhibiting some of the same problems with literacy and critical thinking my students have. You disembed what you read from what you know of the context, what you know about the person who wrote what you're reading, and from other things you've read by that person... and then you write reactively, unsympathetically and polemically... and then blame the left for being fractured.
You foolishly conflate my statements about critical thinking within the context of public education with my approach to and understanding of political organizing. My pedagogy is not political organizing, was yours?
Similarly, you equally foolishly conflate my concerns with public education with a denigration of the public. This can only be done if you've studiously forgotten what I've written in other contexts on this issue. My students are stupid or incapable, they've been socialized to be individualistic, instrumentalist and xenophobic in all things and this gets as much in the way of their literacy and critical thinking as it does the political consciousness and activity.
Additionally, you foolishly assume that I believe the only route to literacy and critical thinking is by means of educational institutions. I've known far too many remarkably literate, critical and political folks who hated and did poorly in school to take this stance and have said so in the past.
Furthermore, while you seem quite happy with the idea that there are elite theorists, highly literate leaders and barely literate followers, I am not and would just as soon be part of a process whereby there are fewer barely literate, uncritical and natively right wing thinkers out there. Educational institutions can be part of this process, not the whole of it, but part of it. It isn't what most legislators, administrators, teachers or students want education to beYou can't possibly have found that American individualism, the absence of basic historical or geographic knowledge, the vast void that exists where cosmopolitan interest in the world beyond local communities might lie, etc. doesn't impede organizing, nor that it doesn't reinforce rightward or apolitical tendencies in conventional socialization.
Lastly, you somehow hold a position that suggests it is utterly non-problematic for the left and left organizing that a huge portion of Americans don't accept that social problems are in fact social - unreflexively believing that people with problems are problematic people unworthy of consideration or care (unless the people with problems are directly known by the individuals in question, at which point the people with problems are the worthy exception.) [Nice use of derogatory scare quotes, by the way - imputes meanings to me I clearly don't hold but which serve your polemical purposes.] These same folks, if they have any environmental sensibilities at all, believe that environmental problems are technical problems to be solved by innovation and market adoption and diffusion or by means of buying commodities that are better for the environment or their individual health - an utterly asocial politics of relying on other people to do the right thing or yourself to buy the right thing. No social relations need change, just markets and individuals. The obverse of this is that real problems can only be solved by great men and women and therefore great men and women need to be left to solve the intractable problems the rest don't understand. What is your understanding of Marx's use of the terms reification and fetishism? Do they have any material referent or historical important w/r/t understanding the hegemonic ideologies of the day and their material manifestation as obstacles to the left?
APR