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

[Carrol Cox]

There is probably a thin scattering of leftists around the world who were
radicalized by reading. (I'm skeptical, but we will assume that for the sake
of argument.) The vast bulk of readers of radical texts are people who have
become radicalized through  participation in one or another struggle, most
probably through conversation with others in the struggle who are already
radicals, but a large number on their own.  It is these radicals,
radicalized without the help of reading, who then make up the readers of
left literature. In times of left upsurge, even those who are really poor or
mediocre readers will be helped through conversation or formal help by
others. In the early '70s when Jan & I got together a Red group in B/N, two
of the members had no college. For one of our study sessions, I taped the
whole of Wages, Price and Profit and they read the text while listening to
the tapes. That solved the main problem poor readers have: they read too
slowly to grasp whole units, too slowly to link early parts of the text to
later parts. (Unfortunately I've lost the tapes -- or maybe they kept them.)

I've met, t alked to, worked with many radicals over the last 45 years; I
don't remember a single one who was radicalized by reading; even those who
became the intellectuals of movements usually went to leftist reading only
after some kind of experience in struggle had caused them to seek out
radical texts. Also, though I never directly dealt with politics in my
teaching, I interested a number of students (usually brighter ones) in
Marxism; not one of them entered into political activity. They found it
intellectually stimulating, but it had nothing to do with how they led their
lives.

What SA points out is interesting. But these scores are of no use whatever
in explaining contemporary political activity.

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: Friday, January 28, 2011 8:08 PM
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 6:27 PM, SA <s11131978 at gmail.com> wrote:


>  On 1/27/2011 10:33 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>
>  Well, we've got a generation of K-12 kids who score miserably on
>> international tests, we're about the only country in the world where
people
>> in their 20s are not surpassing the educational attainment of people in
>> their 50s, and a major chunk of college students are getting
approximately
>> nothing out of their experience, yet we nonetheless think we're pretty
>> fucking great. I dunno, I see a problem with that.
>>
>
> I read the summary OECD volume on the PISA tests and this doesn't really
> square with my overall impression. Glancing at it again, I see that US
> students scored at the OECD average on reading and came in slightly ahead
of
> Sweden and France. US performance really wasn't so bad. It almost always
> came out about average among the OECD, i.e., among the richest countries
in
> the world.
>
>
I exactly. I posted links to the latest results earlier in this thread, with
precisely this observation.

Of course, I can barely keep track of where this thread is, now.
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