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

[Carrol Cox]

I distrust my own personal experience, just as I distrust the personal
experience of others. But for what it's worth, very very few of my
contemporaries read seriously. I graduated from high school in 1947. Not
more than about a half, I would say, of the candidates for the Ph.D. in
English at Michigan read very intelligently.

I reject flatly the 'standard' I am using in the previous paragraph. But if
you use those standards of "competence," then that was my experi4ence: not
very many even at the grad level had such competence. I be some of them (the
incompetent ones), however, made pretty good teachers and made real
contributions to the development of the critical reading skills of those
they taught.

One of the better bits of "literary criticism" I received from a student was
from a student who in three semesters never turned in one paper that didn't
consist of fragments and run-ons. But when he sat in my office talking about
Rabbit, Run, he orally, off the cuff, produced a really beautiful (and
well-'written'_ paragraph maing a rather interesting point about the book.

Carrol

Carrol

-----Original Message-----
From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org]
On Behalf Of Jeffrey Fisher
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 12:36 PM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 10:48 AM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 10:04 AM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> > Well, yeah, I'm all for that, but my question was why don't kids today
> want to read?
>
> If this is true, is it different from the more recent past?

Never mind the very distant past. Said the medievalist.


> That's a
> real question. Very few of my contemporaries (born in '69) read for
> pleasure, and when they read because they had to, they didn't read
> very well, it always seemed to me.
>

I agree. I'm '67, and had the same experience. Anecdotal, sure, but there it
is.


>
> Tentative answer: Kids read all the time. They just don't read "texts."
>

I have another tentative answer: a lot of the kids who don't like to read
are kids who wouldn't have been in college thirty years ago. But we are
surprised when all the numbers look different . . .

j
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