On Sat, Jan 29, 2011 at 8:51 PM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> I have no hard data, but my impression is that the population of students
> who would be likely to read are the exact same population that are college
> bound and therefore mired in lots of A.P. classes, extracurricular
> activities, and lots of homework, which seriously cuts down on leisure
time.
>
> When I was in high school (second best academic high school in L.A. from
69
> to 71 (I skipped a half a grade), in my junior year, I took one AP class;
in
> my senior year I took two AP classes. this was considered hot shit back
> then. Kids are now routinely taking four A.P. classes a year. And these
are
> not the type of A.P. classes I was taking; they're all like cram fests.
It's
> really quite, quite horrible.
>
> You see, education is being destroyed on both ends: for the inner city
kids
> it's drill and kill; for the upward bound it's A.P. drill and kill. The
> result is that most kids come to really hate school and what passes for
> "learning."
>
> Joanna
I am teaching an Honors Class. The students pretty much all read and write better and more engagingly than the vast vast majority of the students in my gen ed classes AND the majority of the Soc majors I teach in 300 and 400-level classes in the major.
My best students - the best readers and the best writers - have almost always been kids from relatively privileged backgrounds OR queers, environmentalists, racially politicized, or metal- or punk-loving lower income kids... basically, angry kids with an ax to grind about something. The former are pretty good to teach the latter are a world of fun to teach.
I really think it is imperative to see this in its complexity. It is true that far more folks who would not have gone to college in the past now go to college AND that the majority of faculty either are not from the class/status background of their students or have a strong tendency to forget what ignoramuses THEY were at 18-22 or how different they were from the rest of their classmates when they were 18-22.
At the same time, if you take this too seriously, then you discount the extent to which public education at the primary and secondary level has genuinely been damaged by both the devastation of the lower middle and lower income strata of the US but also by the soul crushing and mind numbing "reforms" of the last thirty years. Even at the schools in education-obsesses upper middle income communities like East Lansing, MI, a huge proportion of the educational structure is intellectually stultifying. While it was always so, in large part (it certainly was in most of my HS classes in upper middle income, Bell Labs- and NYC commuter-driven, suburban Jersey in the 70s), talking to long-tenured teachers and even those who've been at it for just about a decade, the expectations of the school board, administrators, parents and students - much less the imperatives of NCLB and its state-level derivations - make the small number of more genuinely intellectually provocative classes that existed before increasingly impossible to teach.
Carrol's made a number of good points but I can say that, without a doubt, a number of smart apolitical kids at Swarthmore in the early 1980s were moved left (not to the Left but leftward) by some of our coursework - and it didn't matter if it was Biology, or Literature, or Philosophy, or History or Soc/Anth. I am sure the political tenor of the times helped as well. I may not radicalize my Social Problems students but most of them have had no conception of the role of race or gender in the 2008 election, most of them have poo-poo'd green consumerism for class reasons but never engaged with any information about any of the toxics floating around in water, food and air, and most of them have absolutely no sense of the ways that identity has been commodified. I do not produce leftists in my Intro, Social Problems, Social Theory, Racism and Inequality, Social Inequality, Political Sociology or any other class. At the same time, for those who do the reading, who come to class, who listen to lectures and/or participate in discussions, critical material they never would otherwise have been exposed to is engaged. Carrol, and some others, seem to be suggesting that this sort of work - done by people across universities and colleges across the country - has no political purpose, matters not an iota at any level and that the folks engaging in it ought to disabuse themselves that their efforts mean anything.
Perhaps I'm holding on to a necessary illusion, perhaps Jeffrey is too, perhaps it is not as bad as all that but it seems to me that the ease with which some folks are dismissing education as a social institution - however contradictory an institution it is (and most of us in it are well aware of its contradictions) - is stunning. Poverty, debt, hunger and cultures of cowboy individualism and populist anti-intellectualism certainly matter, and education certainly is a central ideological tool in the anti-Left arsenal of liberals and conservatives but how lefty folks here can make the argument that in and of itself education matters not a whit is no little bit worrisome.