I wrote: "By the early 20th century, the student culture was much like the one we see today: "resistance to speaking in class; social distance from faculty; a 'code of honor' that included silence about cheating, drinking, and other infractions; a hedonistic emphasis on fun, sex, and alcohol as markers of the *real* college experience." (p 108)
Interestingly enough, according to Horowitz, it was the non-elite and outsiders who crafted an alternative culture: people from poor backgrounds, Jewish men and women, men and women of color, and white women. The tended to work hard and/or felt themselves somehow outsiders to the elite who dominated colleges in the early 20th c. These are the people who would be ridiculed as grinds, who didn't get involved in sports culture, social clubs, drinking, and greek culture. These students tended to believe in the mythology that university was a way to break out of their social caste or class, so they were unaware that, for the elite, all of that was utter bullshit."
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20110606/006514.html
<> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/education/more-students-charged-in-long-island-sat-cheating-case.html?_r=1&ref=education <> <> [WS:] I hear that this is a wide spread phenomenon. Everyone does <> it: administrators, teachers, and students cum their parents. <> <> I see is as an inevitable product of standardized testing, which is a <> blatant example of Taylorisation of education. It takes away control <> of educational process from skilled labor (teachers) and farms it out <> to semi-skilled workers directly supervised by business managers. <> While this model can produce test scores more "efficiently" than <> teachers do, it also creates incentives for cheating by teachers and <> administrators. <> <> My wife who is a school teacher tells me that about one third of all <> instruction time (184 days) is devoted to testing of one sort of <> another. This means only administering tests, not preparing for them. <> If any other industry used one third of its productive resources for <> measurements and reporting it would be used as a textbook example of <> wastefulness and inefficiency. But in education, this is equated with <> "efficiency," and for a very simple reason - it makes the control of <> the direct producers by business managers more efficient. <> Clearly,"efficiency" is a code word for "managerial power and <> control." <> <> What baffles me is why people go with this bullshit. Schools are <> controlled locally, so it would be easy to pass ordinances that either <> ban using standardized testing altogether or render them totally <> useless as the means of control. For example, an ordinance that <> limits the number of test days to one per semester, and an ordinance <> that mandates the use of several different testing alternatives and <> allowing students to chose which form they want to take. Such <> ordinances would likely receive considerable support from the public <> and across the political spectrum. <> <> Emasculating the testing-industrial complex and its "organic <> intellectuals" in the academia is the necessary condition for any <> meaningful educational reform in this country. <> <> Wojtek <> ___________________________________ <> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk <>
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)