That is speculation, but it makes as much sense as all this nonsense about how sad it is that so many (possibly, possibly not) isolated individuals can "read" or want to read.
And almost all the posts in this thread are apolitical: they are the isolated judgment of an individual focusing on an isolated "skill" of millions of isolated individuals not personally known but only known through either impressionistic anecdotal evidence or abstract tests, taken in _enforce_ isolation.
Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Chris Sturr Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 3:54 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?
More anecdotal evidence: Dollars & Sense textbooks (which are anthologies of D&S articles, updated every year or so, intended mostly as supplements to standard micro- and macroeconomics courses) don't tend to get adopted by professors at the fancy schools (for the simple reason that left economists don't tend to get hired at the fancy schools). And we are happy that we're reaching mostly students in intro econ courses at state schools and community colleges.
Over the years we'd *occasionally* heard from instructors that the reading level of the articles is too high or that the articles are too long. But in the past couple of years, among all the other challenges we face in the textbook market these days, instructors are saying this kind of thing more and more. And D&S articles aren't very tough going, I don't think--certainly easier than the Manifesto (to take Doug's example), and they are pretty short (many of them are just a couple of pages!).
We did a reading-level analysis of articles a few years ago and they were about at "13th grade" level (i.e. college freshmen), but I guess the point of this thread is that college freshmen aren't reading at that level anymore. (It is possible that the reading level of D&S articles has gone up in the past couple of years, just because explaining the economic crisis is hard. So one of the longest and toughest articles in our main textbook, *Real World Macro*, is Katherine Sciacchitano's "W(h)ither the Dollar?" ( http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2010/0510sciacchitano.html). I pushed to include it anyway because it's such a good article. I figured some profs could skip it, and others could just tell their students to buck up and read it a few times.)
The other thing instructors have been telling us is that students get pissed off if the professor only assigns half or two thirds of the articles in a book the students have been required to buy. Our books are cheap as textbooks go ($34.95 is our most expensive title), but again they are usually supplements, and a main economics text can be $120 or more. That is sort of a separate issue, but related if you wonder why students think it's a waste to have a book on their shelf with bits a professor didn't require them to read, which returns to the original question of why today's students don't like to read.
For what it's worth, I was born in 1967, and I wasn't much of a reader of novels (compared to the rest of my family) until maybe ten years ago, and now I can't stop--always have at least a couple going, read a few dozen a year. And I am always surprised at how many people around my age, give or take ten years, also read a ton. Same, come to think of it, with the undergrads who intern at D&S (who also are not from super-fancy schools), though they are self-selected I suppose.
--Chris Sturr
PS Joanna--you mentioned studying intensive Latin and Greek full-time: was that the CUNY/Brooklyn College Latin/Greek Institute? I did the Latin program there--very intense. I remember that you weren't allowed to give the wrong answer in class, or at any rate you couldn't say, when they called on you, that you couldn't figure that part of the Aeneid out--the instructors were on call 24 hours a day to help, so there was no excuse (which didn't mean you called them at 3am, it just meant you couldn't use that excuse!). One of the best pedagogical experiences I ever had (not that I can read Latin anymore).
On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 4:18 PM, <lbo-talk-request at lbo-talk.org> wrote:
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 4
> Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 13:07:38 -0600
> From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?
> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Message-ID: <D1E0DEE5D7CD416099DBBA762FACD79F at CarrolHPDesk>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Doug Henwood:
> I had classes in college where we were supposed to read 200 pages a week -
> and the average was 4.5 classes a semester (36 required to graduate). It
> stuns me that anything over 30 pages is considered too much.
>
> At Yale?
>
> Not relevant to this thread.
>
> Carrool
>
> --
--
Chris Sturr
Co-editor, *Dollars & Sense*
29 Winter St.
Boston, Mass. 02108
phone: 617-447-2177, ext. 205
fax: 617-447-2179
email: sturr at dollarsandsense.org
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