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

[Dissenting Wren]

When I was a kid my grandfather got up every morning to listen to the farm 
report - which had nothing to do with tilling the soil and everything to do with 
futures markets.  And so did everyone else like him.  I bet farmers still do - 
except probably on the internet rather than on the radio.  And it didn't take 
much study to figure out that the gold standard made exports more expensive and 
debts harder to repay, which was the basis of the populist demand for free 
coinage of silver.  I'll bet kids still spend time learning how an internal 
combustion engine works.  People pick up the basics of arcane technical material 
outside of school all the time, not all of the time by reading about it.

To loop back to the original study - the "critical thinking" that the CLA tries 
to measure is nothing more than the ability to coherently and plausibly draw a 
conclusion from evidence.  It has nothing to do with a critical perspective on 
society at large.  And you can develop such a critical perspective without 
having the "critical thinking" skills that the CLA tries to test.  But at a 
certain point, those kind of skills become important.  Let us imagine that a 
socialist revolution actually won somewhere.  The question of whether to 
distribute goods through a price mechanism or not - and if not what other 
mechanism to use and how to make it feasible - would present itself almost 
immediately.  Figuring out what to do would require a very refined ability to 
master a quite arcane and technical debate, and to draw not just plausible but 
correct conclusions.  So while this variety of "critical thinking" isn't a 
sufficient condition for any kind of critical stance on society, and isn't a 
necessary condition for acquisition of an oppositional mentality, very highly 
developed skills of this sort would be needed to move from opposition to the 
successful exercise of power (where success means enhancement of human welfare, 
not just hanging on).

----- Original Message ----
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
Sent: Sun, January 30, 2011 7:51:49 PM
Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?

On Jan 30, 2011, at 7:18 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:


> You need leisure time to read.

http://bls.gov/news.release/atus.htm

The average American has 5.25 hours of leisure a day - somewhat more for men, 
somewhat less for women. That is not a trivial amount of time. More than half 
that time is spent watching TV. American spend an average of 1/2-3/4 an hour a 
day reading (men the low end, women the high). Those with kids spend an average 
of .04 hours a day - that's 2.4 minutes - reading to them.

It's a commonplace that Americans are too overworked and stressed to do much of 
anything, but there's not much data to support that. Farmers and workers in the 
late 19th century studied monetary theory, for god's sake.

Doug
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