> On 5/7/2011 4:13 PM, Dennis Claxton wrote:
>
> I was in the car for a couple hours yesterday and listened to a lot of
> sports radio. If only americans thought as deeply and critically about
> politics as they do about sports we'd be like, I don't know, France or
> something.
>
> --------
> In other words Americans are not deficient in the capacity for deep and
> critical thinking, and those sociologists who claimed college students
> couldn't, and those lbo posters who agreed with the sociologists were all
> full of shit. It wasn't that the college students (or for that matter, the
> high-school dropouts) are intellectually unable to think critically; they
> simply (for reasons no one cares to investigate, chose different topics to
> think about. In fact all statements that detached intellectuals choose to
> make about the "intelligence" of the poulation are full of shit because they
> are grounded in narrow and possibly irrelevant judgments of what topics
> people 'should' think about.
>
> Carrol
>
>
Again, repeating a point I make repeatedly, exactly (I am not complaining
about this)... seein' as how you and I and a number of others here actually
have experience teaching the young people (and non-traditional students)
about whom such things are said. It turns out, by the way, that very
critical material can be taught to, and ingested and digested by, students
in sociology of sport classes, sociology of pop culture classes and
basically sociology of things about which students care classes... all as an
element of engaging their existent but usually dormant sociological
imaginations and knowledge - imaginations and knowledge which are inherently
critical (if often otherwise turned in libertarian, populist or indifferent
directions).