[lit-ideas] Re: What's wrong with Campus Watch for all?
- From: John McCreery <mccreery@xxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2004 18:50:43 +0900
On 2004/03/21, at 15:54, Scribe1865@xxxxxxx wrote:
> Because I do not believe Robert is out of touch with what it is like
> to be a
> student, but on the contrary believe he knows more about this subject
> than I
> do, I can only assume that he has taken my broaching the subject as
> itself a
> Fishy Trojan horse to some political agenda of my own. Not so. I
> wanted to read
> what others thought, although granted, I had hoped for a less edgy
> response.
For what it is worth, I think myself that there is something to be said
for both sides of this discussion.
On Robert's side, there is no reason to assume that grade-obsessed
students cunning enough to write what they think that a professor wants
to see necessarily believe what they write--and that is assuming that
they understood what the professor was saying in the first place.
There are multiple reasons for believing these propositions. First, it
is probably true for the majority of students, even quite bright ones,
that they grasp only a fraction of what their professors try to teach
them. Second, this may have always been true--one of my most vivid
memories from the net was a wonderful post consisting of a letter
written by Henry George in which he notes that nine out of ten of his
students at nineteenth century Harvard were never going to be scholars;
his advice was to give them their gentleman's Cs and otherwise ignore
them. There are now, moreover, the effects of what we are pleased to
call the information society to be taken into account, together with
the transformation of colleges and universities into intellectual
supermarkets where students, at least those not taking a highly
structured trade or professional curriculum, fill their shopping
baskets as they will. I had already noted, while teaching at Middlebury
College in Vermont in the early 1970s how it was no longer possible to
assume even the rudimentary shared intellectual background that a
combination of Sunday School and the usual sort of public school
curriculum provided in the 50s and early 60s. Even then, allusions to
the Bible or Julius Caeser, The Mill on the Floss or the Federalist
Papers revealed blank incomprehension. A little investigation revealed
that while students knew a great many things, they knew so many
different things that finding common ground for discussion, other than
shared bits of pop culture, was becoming increasingly difficult.
On Eric's side the truth of the matter is, I suspect, not so much this
or that dictatorial professor, as much as it is the more global effects
of intellectual fads. Conservatives are not wrong to complain that much
of current instruction in the social sciences and humanities, at least
outside of economics departments and government and political science
departments where disciples of the late Leo Strauss have dug in, does
have a strongly left-liberal bias. What may be good news for them,
while sad for those of us who pursue the ghost of liberal education,
is that majors in all of the traditional arts and sciences are, in
terms of nationwide figures, way down. Business has become the major of
choice for the majority of American students.
John L. McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama, Japan 220-0006
Tel 81-45-314-9324
Email mccreery@xxxxxxx
"Making Symbols is Our Business"
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