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

[Alan Rudy]

Carrol,
You've made this point six or seven times now.  We know.
While useful for some purposes, you point is ancillary to the level of
analysis many of us are working at - for the moment.
We are capable of understanding your point, not disagreeing with it and
still contributing a range of different things to this discussion.
Hell Doug has interviewed any number of people about these things, a number
of use teach or have taught in universities during the dual expansion of the
student population and the neoliberalization of the institutions, and I've
even written a book on the general topic - though with a particular case as
a focus.  All of our contributions have been limited in any number of ways
but, then again, I bet not one of us thinks we were giving a comprehensive
account of the situation, its depth and breadth.
Social reality works at a whole slew of levels and it is not possible to say
everything that could be said in one post, this is an informal discussion
list and most of us like it that way.  We're dead serious sometimes and just
fooling around others, we're deeply political and intellectually
sophisticated sometimes and sometimes just throwing stuff against the wall
to see what sticks, we're casually exploring issues sometimes and asking
technical questions at others.  Sometimes its best to let this thing be what
it is.
APR

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> 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
>
>