[lbo-talk] Sternberg article on Academically Adrift

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Feb 8 20:28:24 PST 2011


Miles Jackson:

Why should we assume that these qualitatively different forms of learning are correlated? When we claim "students aren't learning", and we use a goofy measure that only assesses one of distinct aspects of learning, we are not providing compelling evidence to support our general claim. Is it possible that college students suck at creative, practical, and ethical thinking? Sure. Have the authors provided any evidence to support that claim? Absolutely not.

I will reiterate Sternberg's point: standardized tests like the CLA do not accurately and comprehensively assess what we expect students to learn in college. =======

Indeed. But I have been interested in another aspect of this question. The concepts of "what should students learn in college" or "what we expect students to learn in college" have not been analyzed: there has been a general lack of analytic (critical) thinking here. Moreover, what students learn in college _obviously_ include many 'things' (many categories of 'things") that no one it seems (anywhere) has even attempted to identify. Analysis, I believe, consists of breaking an entity into its various parts and studying the relations (or non-relations) of those parts. Learning, or more narrowly, college learning, has not been analyzed, its parts have not been identified, and a mechanical group of somewhat vague assumptions of what college students _should_ learn have been substituted for such analysis. My students used to irritate me (and if I were still teaching I would still be irritated by it) by babbling about learning to "get along with people." I don't retract my irritation: that concept is as unanalyzed as the concepts thrown around on this list. Nevertheless, it needs to be analyzed and subjected to critique. Perhaps that silly phrase, "getting along with people," is just a naïve and unthinking way of piling together various skills, understandings, analytic capacities, etc. that are in fact as important as the students vaguely intuit. (They probably only mean pleasing their bosses, but that doesn't quite solve the problems I'm speaking of.) We need more people in the core of the BNCPJ, that is people who will "spontaneously" assume responsibility for the functioning of the group. They need to be able to listen to others, to grasp an idea presented, to think about the parts of that idea, to venture alternate ways of putting it into practice, or alternate ideas, and so on. And in particular, we need more people of that nature wh are NOT Marxists, who are NOT revolutionaries, who do NOT have a compex analysis of the structure of U.S. society or the nature of the State, who probably do NOT reject the DP (but also happily work with people who do). At this more complex level they only need some simple convictions: e.g., get the damn troops home; stop fucking with teachers; we need to get more people at our demonstrations; we need to figure out better ways to make our monthly meeting reasonably enjoyable. (One of the basic principles here: the leadership a coalition, and all such groups are in effect coalitions whether called that or not), ought not to be revolutionaries.) And such people _usually_ turn out to have some college. . .. I'll have to think it over and I'm getting sleepy.

Carrol



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