For one reason or another, I have always felt a cast out, and so books simply became my virtual home. It is I think a good thing that other people don't feel that way.
But a growing disinclination to read, combined with increasingly fragmented social experience, and vanishing social spaces is disquieting.
Especially sad is the possibility that the race to the top model of schooling is creating a huge body of people who equate learning with meaningless torture.
Joanna
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2011 3:37:41 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?
Homo sapiens evolved as groups, not as individuals "thinking for themselves." All evidence about reading & writing is grounded in what an isolated individual can produce. And of course, reading and writing had no part in our evolution. There is no hard (or for that matter soft) evidence that both reading and writing are not 'freakish' skills of individuals, which cut across the more 'natural' operations of human intelligence, namely thinking aloud in a group -- and a group, moreover defined by common purposes, purposes which involve spontaneous recognition that the individual cannot think by or for him/herself or set his/her individual needs.
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