[lbo-talk] Sternberg article on Academically Adrift

Chuck Grimes c123grimes at att.net
Tue Feb 8 15:06:21 PST 2011


I just finished the article and had very mixed thoughts about it. I am coming to this thread, very late. I needed to take a break from following Egypt. (BTW, they seem to be doing a fine job, not fooled by any of the manuvering by Mubarak, US, EU, or anybody else...)

I approved of the general critique of testing, but bothered by the basic assumption that psychology and or cognitive science can profile, measure, or even asses any kind of thinking. I assume this assumption is itself in deep contestation within the field. Another thing that bothered me was Sternberg's pushing the Lumina Foundation's assessment over CLF.

What are we really looking at here, a bunch of corporate brands, fighting it out on the supermarket shelves of college testing services? Call me paranoid, but I see this competition as just another approach to gain corporate entry into higher education, indirectly by making these kinds of assessments part of the education system. Just the mention of business executive in the same sentence with science and social science majors bothered me:

``How, for example, would a physicist, or sociologist, or historian, or educator, or business executive think about a particular problem?''

It has that entrepreneurial smell to it, because he followed this sentence with ad copy for the Lumina Degree Profile test...

In general, the problems with public higher education are economic and political problems that are not being solved along the corrective social channels. Internally, I suspect the problems are generally not coming from students, but from administrations who are constantly harrassing, deforming, and manipulating their faculty and students. Adding any `new' kind of external test is a completely bad idea. These are deep systemic problems with administrations in general, which I watched a long time ago, try to introduced what I thought of as corporate managerial practices `measuring' the student services program I worked for. I now see those practices as the first in-roads of neoliberalism's control over public education.

Fifty years ago, in the so-called golden age, I took some college entrance exams required in high school and got very mediocre scores. Those tests were supposed to predict how I would do in college. The scores were used by the counselors to push me toward work rather than college. The tests didn't predict shit, and I was fool to believe they would. So what's the need for another test, fifty years later?

Anyway, the other problem with the essay was it didn't mention the primary source of learning how to become a critical thinker and adapt practitioner of anything. Those sources are the teachers, conducting themselves before a class presenting their subject and students teaching each other informally when they discuss and argue over a subject. Well and students developing their own study skills...like coming to class prepared, doing their homework, assigned reading etc.

I was reminded of this when I went over to UCB's Geography Dept and watched David Harvey's lecture and then again while he was answering questions. Yes! That's the right stuff. Harvey was both a great critical and analytical thinker, and a great teacher of both arts---that's what he was doing.

CG



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