Incidentally, during the 18 years Jan worked at the post office, the most interesting conversationalist and alert intelligence she met there had read only one book in his life, Pearl Buck's Good Earth in high school. There is an ocean of satire going back to the late 17th-c on reading much and gaining nothing.
In the early '50s there was nationwide hysteria over the horrible problem of Why Johnny Can't Read. I think we have an infinite regress here, reading has been degenerating from a millennium before writing was invented. My image in this thread has been of a old feller with tobacco stained beard drawling out how today's kids just don't work I did when I was a kid. The most, if not the only, successful democracy in human history, Athens, was in a culture in which written documents were not accepted as proof of contract: oral testimony was thought to be more trustworthy than written documents. And the peasants who ran the demes were of course all illiterate.
I think it should be seriously considered that in political affairs communication and thought should be primarily oral.
Carrol
I also have trouble knowing what "critical thinking" means.
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Jeffrey Fisher Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2011 9:19 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?
On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 6:17 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> I still simply cannot under stand why anyone finds this study in the least
> interesting.
>
I'm still thinking about this, myself. I am inclined to agree with you that it is not interesting as an indictment, accusing the educational system of having gotten worse at teaching people. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn't, maybe it was never any good. I haven't yet understood this study as making that case compelling.
What it does seem to do, however, is to say that a lot of students seem not to be getting out of their education a lot of what they are told they are going to get out of their education, which is the same as what many of us who teach would like for them to get out of it: critical thinking abilities. There could of course be a million reasons for this. A big one being that they don't read. Which brings us back to Doug's question, btw. But it still begs the question, imo, of whether "they" *ever* read.
Aw, crap. I'm going to have to go read this fricking thing, now, aren't I? Dammit. I have classes to prep.
Harumph
j
ps -- on a related note, I learned this morning that Diane Ravitch is speaking at an event a week from tonight in Milwaukee (at UW-M). Hoping to go in for it. ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk