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

Dissenting Wren dissentingwren at yahoo.com
Sun Feb 6 16:53:12 PST 2011


Well, I took the scholarships and went to the elite colleges, at a time when that was still possible for kids like me (my parents ran a small auto repair shop, neither of them had been to college, yada yada...and if they had split up eight years earlier as they almost did, then I would have been at the local branch of midwest state u). And yeah I learned a lot out of school, especially in the five years between college and grad school when I tried to be a political organizer (and was awfully fucking bad at it). But if I hadn't gone to college I certainly wouldn't have gotten exposed to Marx in any serious way (although my local state u is now a branch of economic heterodoxy, so maybe I would have got it there as well - though I'm not sure what their econ dept was like in the late 70s). And I wouldn't really have understood Marx if I hadn't had to come up against Jon Elster's slashing attacks on the moor - I didn't really get Marx until I had to come up with coherent reasons Elster was wrong. For that matter, I also had to come to terms with some areas where Elster was right and I was still hanging on dogmatically to a bunch of dreck. And I would still know sweet fuck all about Brazil and India - the places that still absorb most of my attention - without some extraordinary resources that grad school put at my disposal. I'd probably still be "left" in some sense, since the experience of getting beaten up by Nixonian thugs for wearing McGovern buttons in junior high tends to stay with you (as do any number of similar humiliations at the hands of the suburban brownshirts I grew up among). But while a nightstick to the head is in some sense an educational experience, it's not even close to enough of an education for someone who wants to do more than rage blindly against the evil fuckers.

The question isn't whether or not good education is a radical demand, as if this were a game of capture the flag and we were all trying to grab the flag called "radical demand". The question is whether our side can win without, at least for some people on our side, extremely difficult and rigorous academic training.

(Yes, much higher than the bar that Carroll characterizes as "extremely high".)

Fuck no, sez I.

----- Original Message ---- From: shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org; lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Sun, February 6, 2011 6:09:50 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?

At 05:46 PM 2/6/2011, Doug Henwood wrote:


> On Feb 6, 2011, at 5:33 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> >> If it weren't for the schooling, where would you be? Probably poor,
>isolated, and confused.
> >>
> >> Doug
> >
> >
> > Maybe you should have counted to ten before pulling the trigger on that one.
>
> I don't see why. I'm tired of listening to all these highly educated people
>dismiss the value of good education.
>
> Doug

You've known me for years - since freakin' 96 fercrisakes. I've never once dismissed the value of knowledge - and btw, most of my education was me reading on my own. I've learned more on this list than I learned in all my years of formal schooling combined. Even in my weird hippy dippy college, I could have skated. The deal was: there was much rigor as you wanted there to be. At a base-level, there always had to be more rigor in a place like that. How many normal college students have to submit a plan for their college course work and defend it in a 20 page essay substantiating why they've chosen the courses they choose?

None of what I said has to do with dismissing learning - in whatever context it takes place. And since I spent a lot of my political life figuring out ways to build opportunities for such learning without relaying on formal schooling.

Learning, knowledge, reading ... these are all wonderful things, in and of themselves. That clause is not a throw-away. They are ends in themselves, not means to radicalization. Treating knowledge as a means to an end - now that, I find, tragic.

and btw, I'm sure I've told this story before, but when I was in high school, I dreamed of being some skirt-suited, briefcase carrying member of the Wall St. class. Had I taken that scholarship, had my parents not split up and had my dad not gone bankrupt, maybe I would have gone to some elite liberal arts college as planned, and joined the ranks. I'm pretty sure, at that age, and absent the experience of watching an economy explode during the 80s, I would have more than willingly gotten some trader job on wall st., putting my critical thinking skills to the awesome purposes of fucking over the rest of the world. shag


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