Here's what it's like for me inside the teaching machine, and why it matters.
First, the instrument used in this study is no mystery. Take a look at the CLA and you'll see that they set the bar for critical thinking really fucking low.
Basically, if you can take a set of documents, make plausible inferences from them, and write them up in prose that an audience can understand, you're a bona fide critical fucking thinker.
Is that enough? Oh mercy sakes no.... But if you can't even do that? And there are so many college students who can't even do that, don't even come close, see no particular reason to be able to do that, certainly don't want to put in the work to learn to do it, and resent it like fuck when you ask them to.
Now whatcha gonna do about it? Well, you could redefine "critical thinking" to mean something like "oppositional stance". Lots of lefty programs do that. Get self-selecting students together to adopt a critical pose in class. Sometimes striking this pose is the only thing the class demands. And some teachers think that's their contribution to "critical thinking." See . . . in my class all the students are really fucking critical of [insert evil du jour here].
Yeah, well bull fucking shit. All these teachers have managed to do is create their own little truth regimes - "radical" truth regimes - within the confines of their 30 or 45 contact hours with students. And the students have learned to perform their subjectivity in the way the truth regime indicates they should.
And in a very short time they will be performing their subjectivity in accord with very different truth regimes.
And if not that, then what? In the case of my unit, we've quietly built up the faculty David Horowitz warned you about, and at the same time we've ramped up the demands of our courses. The 200 pages per week Doug remembers reading at Yale? Yeah, we do that. And the writing requirements are way above the 20 pages per semester Arum and Roksa talk about. With the result that our students spend about three times as much time on their studies in our classes as the university average. (And no, I didn't pull that figure out of my ass - I have a decade's worth of internal data to compare with the NSSE institutional data).
Now, imagine how popular I make myself when I bring this up at a college meeting... Most students at my school gravitate toward majors that demand nothing of them. The number of communication majors got so big that they gave the department its own college. And psychology - the refuge of the permanently self-involved. You get the picture. My program has prospered modestly by betting that there's a fairly long tail on the opposite end, positioning itself as virtually the only program that caters to that tail of the student population. But none of that has done me any good when I make a plea for institutional resources (with the result that we have something like seventy students for every tenure-track faculty line).
So why bother, if this kind of work gets you no institutional respect, if it takes more time (and oh yes, the labor that goes into marking all of those papers...), and if, as some people here seem to think, this is just bourgeois horseshit that has nothing at all to do with the revo?
Because, you know, if you're ever going to win you're going to need at least some cadre that are razor sharp, will work themselves into the ground, and don't base their strategic decisions on enthusiasm or wishful thinking. Not a sufficient condition, but necessary.
Or you can just sneer and dismiss the problem.
Shag wrote...
Carrol strikes me as not especially into flying the banner of 'faux populism' as a substitute for radical left activity -- I mean, srsly, Carrol = Baffler? WTF? nor does he strike me as someone who thinks that the masses do not have any pathologies systematically created by capitalism.
My guess is that his view is much like mine: who gives a shit? What changes once you find out, that, OMIGOD! colleges don't produce critical thinking skills because Capital doesn't want us smart enough to figure out we are enchained.
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