When did the use of the word problematic as a noun cease to be merely the substantive use of the adjective (meaning, thus, problematic [things]) and start to be an object in its own right?
Also: what does this sentence mean?
"It is this context that I want to allude briefly to the problematic of seeing/being seen."
Can one really allude a context to a problematic? I don't think I speak this kind of English :*(
Help. Please.
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
Theory: For These And Other Reasons...
So a few days ago I was in a ranty mood and started writing a post that Blogger in its bloggy wisdom decided to share before it was done. It was part of a process I've been going through trying to deal with some readings on literary theory that I'm slogging through. I've been trying to figure out what it is that gets my back up about them, what frustrates me so much, and I think a recent post by Sisyphus over at Academic Cog started me down the right path, along with a recent post I did myself here. At least in part.
I come from an increasingly lonely planet where the author -- though he or she may have died a thousand years ago, though we may never have known his or her name -- is still very much alive. At least, more alive than in much of the theory I'm reading. On my home planet, literature is, first and foremost, a communicative medium. It is the process of conveying information (intended and unintended) between two people, the writer and the reader. The writer transmits information, and the reader receives.
Of course it's more complicated than that. The reader interprets what has been written based on whatever social or literary conventions s/he is familiar with. The writer tries to anticipate what the reader's toolbox of conventions contains in order to convey the right meaning. Or maybe s/he doesn't, but her or his writing is grounded in societal conventions and the un-thought-of assumption that the readers have the same social understanding. But the fact remains that every word in a book is the product of a writer in a society, and every time a reader picks up a book s/he is interpreting that.
And from what I'm reading, it's like the writer doesn't matter. Anything you can read into a text is okay. Anachronisms, outright confabulations even, and everyone smiles and nods. I feel like I'm watching the naked emperor wandering down the street.
And yeah, that's fine I guess, but it isn't how I understand the function of literature. It speaks to me of an incredible narcissism on the part of the reader to believe that he or she is living in isolation. That only the reader's response matters. It's a two-part process and we're increasingly focused -at least in the readings I'm wading through- on only the receiving end.
So there's that. I have other beefs, but that's the big one, I think.
There's also the tendency of theorists to make grand sweeping generalizations that have no plausible provability. Like the idea that all art originates in ritual (Benjamin), or that all photographs encode death (Barthes). There's also a pervasive "now-centeredness" of opinion, a feeling that we were all functionally illiterate until the linguistic turn. And of course there's my perennial favourite, the tendency to use high-brow jargon or conveluted sentence structures to obfuscate* the fact that what's being talked about is really very simple.
So those are, I think, the issues at the heart of my resistance to capital-T Theory. I'm still reading the stuff. I'm still trying to get something positive out of it. But damn, if it doesn't automatically put me into a confrontational mood, then nothing does.
*read: "hide" -- haHA irony.
I come from an increasingly lonely planet where the author -- though he or she may have died a thousand years ago, though we may never have known his or her name -- is still very much alive. At least, more alive than in much of the theory I'm reading. On my home planet, literature is, first and foremost, a communicative medium. It is the process of conveying information (intended and unintended) between two people, the writer and the reader. The writer transmits information, and the reader receives.
Of course it's more complicated than that. The reader interprets what has been written based on whatever social or literary conventions s/he is familiar with. The writer tries to anticipate what the reader's toolbox of conventions contains in order to convey the right meaning. Or maybe s/he doesn't, but her or his writing is grounded in societal conventions and the un-thought-of assumption that the readers have the same social understanding. But the fact remains that every word in a book is the product of a writer in a society, and every time a reader picks up a book s/he is interpreting that.
And from what I'm reading, it's like the writer doesn't matter. Anything you can read into a text is okay. Anachronisms, outright confabulations even, and everyone smiles and nods. I feel like I'm watching the naked emperor wandering down the street.
And yeah, that's fine I guess, but it isn't how I understand the function of literature. It speaks to me of an incredible narcissism on the part of the reader to believe that he or she is living in isolation. That only the reader's response matters. It's a two-part process and we're increasingly focused -at least in the readings I'm wading through- on only the receiving end.
So there's that. I have other beefs, but that's the big one, I think.
There's also the tendency of theorists to make grand sweeping generalizations that have no plausible provability. Like the idea that all art originates in ritual (Benjamin), or that all photographs encode death (Barthes). There's also a pervasive "now-centeredness" of opinion, a feeling that we were all functionally illiterate until the linguistic turn. And of course there's my perennial favourite, the tendency to use high-brow jargon or conveluted sentence structures to obfuscate* the fact that what's being talked about is really very simple.
So those are, I think, the issues at the heart of my resistance to capital-T Theory. I'm still reading the stuff. I'm still trying to get something positive out of it. But damn, if it doesn't automatically put me into a confrontational mood, then nothing does.
*read: "hide" -- haHA irony.
Tuesday, 8 February 2011
Bruce Greenwood or Sam Neill?
I have, I learned tonight, been mixing up these two guys for years. Sam Neill and Bruce Greenwood. I'm not even sure I see the resemblance anymore. What do you think?
Crap. They look nothing alike. O_o What is wrong with me?
Crap. They look nothing alike. O_o What is wrong with me?
Sunday, 6 February 2011
Kinds of Literacy
A few days ago a commenter named Josef brought up an interesting point (Hi Josef! Glad you're reading!). He'd been reading A World Lit Only By Fire and somehow found his way to my slow but ongoing feature A World Lit Only By Misconceptions. He writes (after some caveats):
And the answer is, it depends:
First, I think we're a ways off from proving that textual literacy rates were higher at all points in Classical Antiquity than in all points in the Middle Ages, so let's not assume that.
Second, widespread literacy is a great thing. It allows a society to record its innovations in a way that preserves as well as transmits. It allows for greater and more frequent improvements on previous ideas. It allows for more general societal understanding of disparate topics. I'm not ever going to say that increased literacy isn't a good thing.
And of course today textual literacy is important, very important, to someone's livelihood in what we typically refer to as "western democracies" (let's just ignore the potential offenses a term like that might cause and move on). Because the literacy rate is so high, if you're not able to read and write, you're at a serious disadvantage.
In Anglo-Saxon England, the same was not the case. Reading and writing of text were only necessary for people in certain occupations, and in those occupations it was of course widespread. If I'm not mistaken the translation of the first books of the Bible into Old English was the first instance of its translation into a vernacular since the general incorporation of the Christian church, so they were doing pretty well, all things considered.
Anyway, the reason I keep saying "textual" literacy, versus other kinds, is because there are other kinds of literacy. We're very good, today, at reading text. But we're also increasingly good at reading visual imagery in a culturally specific way. Internet memes are a fantastic example, but movies and TV are also very good: we understand them, we can draw meaning from them, because we know what to look for. We're familiar with conventions that allow us to interpret them in the way intended by their creators.
Reading can be viewed in many ways, but when we're talking about literacy, we're primarily talking about one half of a two-part process of communication. Person one transmits information and person two receives it. If you as the "reader" don't know the conventions, then the information transmitted is going to come out garbled at best.
Take the Ruthwell or Bewcastle crosses, for instance. We can really only guess at their iconography, because that's information that's been to a great extent lost over the years. We can deduce it to a degree; but, because these are public works, one can only assume that they were meant for some form of public consumption, and that at the time these were made, the general public would have had the literacy skills necessary to read it.
In addition, the Anglo-Saxons had a thriving oral culture, in which stories, legends, poetry, were all passed from person to person, remembered and adapted and created without ever being written down.
Basically, in addition to textual literacy, the people of the Middle Ages were also possessed of a nuanced and complex visual literacy that rivals our own, and a unique and creative oral culture the likes of which the English language hasn't seen in hundreds of years.
To assume that any culture is inferior to our own merely because it is different is dangerous, even when it concerns something so seemingly obvious as literacy. Even though textual literacy is advantageous in many ways, it isn't the only way for a culture to operate, and isn't by any necessity superior.
Hope that clears up things a little bit? :)
I found your discussion regarding literacy bias to be jaw-dropping. Maybe I am just a biased, blinkered individual, but to argue that one should not find literacy to be objectively better than illiteracy strikes me as really, really silly. I am not saying that everything about the Greeks, the Romans, or modern culture is fantastic and the epitome of human development, but reading and writing and recording are clear, obvious positives, no?
And the answer is, it depends:
First, I think we're a ways off from proving that textual literacy rates were higher at all points in Classical Antiquity than in all points in the Middle Ages, so let's not assume that.
Second, widespread literacy is a great thing. It allows a society to record its innovations in a way that preserves as well as transmits. It allows for greater and more frequent improvements on previous ideas. It allows for more general societal understanding of disparate topics. I'm not ever going to say that increased literacy isn't a good thing.
And of course today textual literacy is important, very important, to someone's livelihood in what we typically refer to as "western democracies" (let's just ignore the potential offenses a term like that might cause and move on). Because the literacy rate is so high, if you're not able to read and write, you're at a serious disadvantage.
In Anglo-Saxon England, the same was not the case. Reading and writing of text were only necessary for people in certain occupations, and in those occupations it was of course widespread. If I'm not mistaken the translation of the first books of the Bible into Old English was the first instance of its translation into a vernacular since the general incorporation of the Christian church, so they were doing pretty well, all things considered.
Anyway, the reason I keep saying "textual" literacy, versus other kinds, is because there are other kinds of literacy. We're very good, today, at reading text. But we're also increasingly good at reading visual imagery in a culturally specific way. Internet memes are a fantastic example, but movies and TV are also very good: we understand them, we can draw meaning from them, because we know what to look for. We're familiar with conventions that allow us to interpret them in the way intended by their creators.
Reading can be viewed in many ways, but when we're talking about literacy, we're primarily talking about one half of a two-part process of communication. Person one transmits information and person two receives it. If you as the "reader" don't know the conventions, then the information transmitted is going to come out garbled at best.
Take the Ruthwell or Bewcastle crosses, for instance. We can really only guess at their iconography, because that's information that's been to a great extent lost over the years. We can deduce it to a degree; but, because these are public works, one can only assume that they were meant for some form of public consumption, and that at the time these were made, the general public would have had the literacy skills necessary to read it.
In addition, the Anglo-Saxons had a thriving oral culture, in which stories, legends, poetry, were all passed from person to person, remembered and adapted and created without ever being written down.
Basically, in addition to textual literacy, the people of the Middle Ages were also possessed of a nuanced and complex visual literacy that rivals our own, and a unique and creative oral culture the likes of which the English language hasn't seen in hundreds of years.
To assume that any culture is inferior to our own merely because it is different is dangerous, even when it concerns something so seemingly obvious as literacy. Even though textual literacy is advantageous in many ways, it isn't the only way for a culture to operate, and isn't by any necessity superior.
Hope that clears up things a little bit? :)
Friday, 4 February 2011
Tech Troubles, or, I Hate Blogger Right Now
To anyone following us using an RSS reader: sorry about the completely unfinished, unedited, still-being-thought-through and badly titled piece that went live a minute ago. Blogger decided of its own accord to publish it before it was done. It will be reposted in a short while, finished, and with likely substantial changes.
-Vellum
-Vellum
Monday, 31 January 2011
An Informative Unicorn Chaser
After that rant I felt the need to post something pleasant, so here it is: a lovely five-minute explanation of the peculiarities of The United Kingdom, Great Britain, and the former colonies.
How polite!
How polite!
Why Evolution Can Be A Deal Breaker, And Why It's Not About Belief.
Over at Historiann there's an epic comment thread in which netizens far and wide have been bringing to light their most catastrophic interview experiences, and it's really worth the read if you have the time. But one thread of the discussion has prompted me to write this. The issue of the diverse beliefs of job candidates came up, and one commenter suggested that discussions of "belief" in evolution should be avoided.
Well, if you don't "believe in" evolution (and I'll explain the scare quotes in a minute), I'd strongly advise that you keep that to yourself during any kind of interaction that may affect your hiring. I know that I am not the only person in academia for whom that could be a deal breaker, and here's why:
Depending on your variety of skepticism, I might not be able to trust you to teach.
Modern academia rests squarely on the shoulders of a rational process: hypothesis, evidence, examination, conclusion, repeat (with occasional switch-ups, like new evidence, new hypothesis, new examination, new.. uhm.. repetition, I guess, too. Anyway.). The only way to rationally reach the conclusion that evolution is an invalid theory is to present scientific evidence which indicates that that is the case.
And let's be clear: you don't get to be a part of the debate if you haven't studied evolution. If you can't state how the theory of evolution accounts for the present-day existence of both humans and monkeys, you don't get to be a part of the debate. If you confuse abiogenesis with evolutionary theory (this isn't about the spontaneous generation of life, it's about evolution) you don't get to be a part of the debate. These are the absolute basics of the theory, and if you're not familiar with them, you haven't done any research or critical analysis.
And that's the point: this isn't about freedom of/from religion, it's about critical thinking. Analysis, the ability to think critically about evidence, is the single most important skill an academic possesses. If you said something, anything, that led me to believe that your critical thinking skills were in question, then I couldn't in good conscience recommend you to a hiring committee.
Evolution does not require belief. Scientists don't "believe in" evolution, to them it is the process that best fits the evidence that has been amassed (and yes, there is a Metric F**kton of evidence). Scientists don't "believe in" evolution any more than they "believe in" gravity, atoms, magnetic fields, or any of a hundred other not readily visible things you need to rely on evidence to prove. If good, solid evidence surfaced tomorrow that atoms didn't exist, and that rather than atoms we were composed instead of tiny, tiny cheesecakes, scientists would reassess their theories and come up with new ones. That's what it's about.
If you refused to accept the existence of the process of evolution in totality, then no, I couldn't recommend you. If you understood how the theory of evolution works, but took issue with some minutiae of the theory, I'd suggest writing a paper and entering the academic discussion.
Otherwise, here's the deal: if you will accept that, based on the evidence, evolution is a currently existing and ongoing phenomenon, and that, again according to all evidence, homo sapiens (a misnomer if I ever heard one) shares a common ancestor with other primates, then I will consider it a possibility -- however unlikely -- that the world is in fact only 6,000 years old, and its accompanying understanding that there exists a god with one weird as hell sense of humour.
The reason this isn't about belief is this: if your response is "current scientific consensus is that evolution is the best fit for the evidence" then I don't give a damn what you believe. If you accept that all the evidence seems to point to evolution, but think there's some very powerful being or beings who are pulling the strings to make it just seem to any rational human being that that's the case, then who am I to judge? So long as you accept that there is evidence and that for the time being it points in one very specific direction, you could believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all His Noodley Appendages for all I care.
But if your response, on the other hand, is that you "didn't come from monkeys," then Houston, we're going to have a problem.
Well, if you don't "believe in" evolution (and I'll explain the scare quotes in a minute), I'd strongly advise that you keep that to yourself during any kind of interaction that may affect your hiring. I know that I am not the only person in academia for whom that could be a deal breaker, and here's why:
Depending on your variety of skepticism, I might not be able to trust you to teach.
Modern academia rests squarely on the shoulders of a rational process: hypothesis, evidence, examination, conclusion, repeat (with occasional switch-ups, like new evidence, new hypothesis, new examination, new.. uhm.. repetition, I guess, too. Anyway.). The only way to rationally reach the conclusion that evolution is an invalid theory is to present scientific evidence which indicates that that is the case.
And let's be clear: you don't get to be a part of the debate if you haven't studied evolution. If you can't state how the theory of evolution accounts for the present-day existence of both humans and monkeys, you don't get to be a part of the debate. If you confuse abiogenesis with evolutionary theory (this isn't about the spontaneous generation of life, it's about evolution) you don't get to be a part of the debate. These are the absolute basics of the theory, and if you're not familiar with them, you haven't done any research or critical analysis.
And that's the point: this isn't about freedom of/from religion, it's about critical thinking. Analysis, the ability to think critically about evidence, is the single most important skill an academic possesses. If you said something, anything, that led me to believe that your critical thinking skills were in question, then I couldn't in good conscience recommend you to a hiring committee.
Evolution does not require belief. Scientists don't "believe in" evolution, to them it is the process that best fits the evidence that has been amassed (and yes, there is a Metric F**kton of evidence). Scientists don't "believe in" evolution any more than they "believe in" gravity, atoms, magnetic fields, or any of a hundred other not readily visible things you need to rely on evidence to prove. If good, solid evidence surfaced tomorrow that atoms didn't exist, and that rather than atoms we were composed instead of tiny, tiny cheesecakes, scientists would reassess their theories and come up with new ones. That's what it's about.
If you refused to accept the existence of the process of evolution in totality, then no, I couldn't recommend you. If you understood how the theory of evolution works, but took issue with some minutiae of the theory, I'd suggest writing a paper and entering the academic discussion.
Otherwise, here's the deal: if you will accept that, based on the evidence, evolution is a currently existing and ongoing phenomenon, and that, again according to all evidence, homo sapiens (a misnomer if I ever heard one) shares a common ancestor with other primates, then I will consider it a possibility -- however unlikely -- that the world is in fact only 6,000 years old, and its accompanying understanding that there exists a god with one weird as hell sense of humour.
The reason this isn't about belief is this: if your response is "current scientific consensus is that evolution is the best fit for the evidence" then I don't give a damn what you believe. If you accept that all the evidence seems to point to evolution, but think there's some very powerful being or beings who are pulling the strings to make it just seem to any rational human being that that's the case, then who am I to judge? So long as you accept that there is evidence and that for the time being it points in one very specific direction, you could believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and all His Noodley Appendages for all I care.
But if your response, on the other hand, is that you "didn't come from monkeys," then Houston, we're going to have a problem.
Friday, 28 January 2011
Wherever will we find the cash? Oh wait.
So I just read this lovely piece by Philip Pullman about the approaching closures of libraries and social services all across England because the British government is being run by a whole host of burkes. He says it much more politely, but I have to admit, every time I hear about the cuts to education, public welfare, LIBRARIES for Chrissakes, it makes me just a little more incensed.
They keep maintaining that there just isn't enough to go around. "We're sorry," they say, "but we can't afford to subsidize education/community/society."
Meanwhile, they have increased spending on "defense" by One And A Half Billion Dollars.
Let me just say that again: in the midst of huge government cuts to things that affect the daily lives and future careers of millions of UK citizens, not to mention the future structure of British society, they have increased government spending on the military from £35,165,000,000 to £36,702,000,000. This is, as far as I can tell, after the 8% cut announced last October. I'm not really sure where that 8% is coming out of (perhaps that was originally going to be a bigger increase?), but you'd think that three months would be enough for them to update their website, so I can only assume that these are the right numbers. (God, they're good at squirrelling away funds for the military, though -- did you know that an additional £9.5Billion has been spent since 2001 in Afghanistan that isn't recorded as a part of the defense budget? It just comes from the Treasury Reserve. Can we get a billion to fight the war on ignorance, TR?).
Thing is, I have a lot of respect for the military. I think they do a good job. One that I couldn't do. My question is, how can it cost so much? Military spending is the most incredible thing. For the same amount of money as it costs to buy 16 fancy fighter jets (which they were, before the cuts, scheduled to buy over 130 from the US, at around £75million each) the UK could provide £9,000 tuition to 170,777 university students.
Thing is, the £3.25 billion shortfall they expect in the budget this year that they're taking out of public services like libraries, tuition subsidies, the AHRC, arts funding, and so forth, is chump change when you think about the costs of waging war.
The US does the same thing, probably worse. They just never really funded education in the first place, so people are used to it. You just can't question the spending on the military, because that would be un-Amurrican. Socialist, even.
...You know I was right-wing in the country I'm from.
So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't get it. I don't understand the priorities. I don't understand the costs. I don't get it, but it leaves me with a strong feeling of unease, that my education (undergrad, masters and doctorate, including tuition remission) costs about as much as a well-aimed missile. That it costs $80,000 in bullets alone to kill one Taliban fighter in Afghanistan. That an unmanned Predator drone costs the same as sending over 300 students to undergrad for a year.
But the UK can't afford to keep its libraries open.
They keep maintaining that there just isn't enough to go around. "We're sorry," they say, "but we can't afford to subsidize education/community/society."
Meanwhile, they have increased spending on "defense" by One And A Half Billion Dollars.
Let me just say that again: in the midst of huge government cuts to things that affect the daily lives and future careers of millions of UK citizens, not to mention the future structure of British society, they have increased government spending on the military from £35,165,000,000 to £36,702,000,000. This is, as far as I can tell, after the 8% cut announced last October. I'm not really sure where that 8% is coming out of (perhaps that was originally going to be a bigger increase?), but you'd think that three months would be enough for them to update their website, so I can only assume that these are the right numbers. (God, they're good at squirrelling away funds for the military, though -- did you know that an additional £9.5Billion has been spent since 2001 in Afghanistan that isn't recorded as a part of the defense budget? It just comes from the Treasury Reserve. Can we get a billion to fight the war on ignorance, TR?).
Thing is, I have a lot of respect for the military. I think they do a good job. One that I couldn't do. My question is, how can it cost so much? Military spending is the most incredible thing. For the same amount of money as it costs to buy 16 fancy fighter jets (which they were, before the cuts, scheduled to buy over 130 from the US, at around £75million each) the UK could provide £9,000 tuition to 170,777 university students.
Thing is, the £3.25 billion shortfall they expect in the budget this year that they're taking out of public services like libraries, tuition subsidies, the AHRC, arts funding, and so forth, is chump change when you think about the costs of waging war.
The US does the same thing, probably worse. They just never really funded education in the first place, so people are used to it. You just can't question the spending on the military, because that would be un-Amurrican. Socialist, even.
...You know I was right-wing in the country I'm from.
So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't get it. I don't understand the priorities. I don't understand the costs. I don't get it, but it leaves me with a strong feeling of unease, that my education (undergrad, masters and doctorate, including tuition remission) costs about as much as a well-aimed missile. That it costs $80,000 in bullets alone to kill one Taliban fighter in Afghanistan. That an unmanned Predator drone costs the same as sending over 300 students to undergrad for a year.
But the UK can't afford to keep its libraries open.
Monday, 24 January 2011
Impolite things.
An open letter to Routledge, and secondary sellers of the book I want:
Dear Routledge,
I realize that the book I want from you was published all of nine years ago, and perhaps the price that you charge for it was just as high then. Perhaps that's why not enough people expressed enough interest in it for you to bother publishing a cheaper, paperback copy. But here's something I have to tell you, Routledge:
Unless that collection of essays LAYS BIG SHINY GOLDEN EGGS, I WILL NOT PAY $125 FOR IT.
That is all.
Sincerely,
A STUDENT WHO CAN'T AFFORD A $125 DOLLAR BOOK, YOU FREAKS.
WHAT THE HELL? O_O
Dear Routledge,
I realize that the book I want from you was published all of nine years ago, and perhaps the price that you charge for it was just as high then. Perhaps that's why not enough people expressed enough interest in it for you to bother publishing a cheaper, paperback copy. But here's something I have to tell you, Routledge:
Unless that collection of essays LAYS BIG SHINY GOLDEN EGGS, I WILL NOT PAY $125 FOR IT.
That is all.
Sincerely,
A STUDENT WHO CAN'T AFFORD A $125 DOLLAR BOOK, YOU FREAKS.
WHAT THE HELL? O_O
Tuesday, 18 January 2011
"Academically Adrift" or Just Learning to Swim?
In an article published today in the New York Times, under "The Choice: Demystifying College Admissions and Aid" is an article titled "How Much Do College Students Learn, and Study?". It's about a new book and study being published by professors Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, called "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses." Now I can't speak to the quality of the book, but the content of this article does raise, for me, some cause for concern -- and not concern about the quality of education the students are receiving.
Instead, my concern is for the alarm-ringing, flag-waving, media-friendly BS that passes for scholarship these days.
The study, as you might guess from the title, purports to be about the "fact" that in their study of "undergraduates at two dozen universities, [they] concluded that 45 percent “demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college.” "
I kid you not.
Why isn't this cause for concern, you may ask? Why am I not worried that nearly half of undergrads aren't improving "significantly" (whatever that means) their "broad analytic and problem-solving skills" in the first two years of undergraduate study?
You're here reading, so I'll assume you want me to tell you.
First, the study was done on 2300 undergrads at 24 institutions. Let's round that up to 2400 to be generous, and to make the math easier. That means that on average, at each of two dozen campuses, they studied 100 students. Not a bad sample size, all things considered. Except that at my undergraduate institution, that would be 0.2% of the population. I don't know if they take into account the differences between type of institutions (Community Colleges, R1s, SLACs, etc.) but I should like to know what statistical differences they found between them, as well.
Second, the study was done using the "Collegiate Learning Assessment":
It's a standardized test. Standardized tests do not, in fact, measure anything except the ability of a given student to take that particular standardized test. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner this country learns that, the better. Moving on, that little caveat (you know, that minor bit about not measuring the development of field-specific skills?) isn't so little.
One of the hardest parts of undergraduate learning is the steep difference in standards between even well-performing high schools and first-year university classes. There's a reason that most students can expect to have their marks drop by a full letter grade when they first enter undergraduate study: it's harder. That the first two years are spent trying to get up to speed in a new environment (both academic and social) alone would be enough to account for the fact that the lower-performing 45% of the students taking a standardized test don't show "significant" improvement in broad analytical skills.
That doesn't even take into account that a huge number of undergraduate programs are specialized from the get-go, meaning that the first two years are the first two years of a psychology program, or of a business program, or of an electrical engineering program -- where those years are spent, specifically, on learning to operate in a specific discipline.
Maybe a student in second-year economics won't see much improvement in broad analytical skills just yet, but I'll bet s/he'll see a pretty major improvement in her/his ability to understand economic systems.
The study purports to address this problem that "almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get [to college]? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no." (From the University of Chicago Press site)
Are they learning anything? Well, they aren't getting better on this one standardized test. In the first two years. Well, a little under half of them aren't. And we didn't take into account the time it takes to adapt to a new learning environment, or that what they might be working hardest on isn't broad analytical skills, but rather discipline-specific skills we don't measure. So I guess our answer is no, they aren't learning anything.
Face, meet palm.
Of course, this can all be fixed (because it's broken, don't you see?) by having students do more work:
My God, a third of students don't take courses that require more than 40 pages of reading a week? And fully half didn't write more then twenty pages in a single class in a single semester? Sacre Dieu! It's like half of the students they polled are in the sciences or something.
Of course it's the institutions' fault. The study asks "What if at the beginning of the 21st century many colleges and universities were not focused primarily on undergraduate learning, but instead had become distracted by other institutional functions and goals?"
Yes. What if.
I have another "what if" -- what if, at the beginning of the 21st century, academics were given financial incentives to pass off this kind of alarmist pap as significant research?
This is, from what I can tell, a poorly put-together argument that loosely associates poor research findings with scapegoating accusations. It begins, like all bad science, with an intended outcome and a reason for it (read: our schools are failing us and it's Your Fault) and then uses water-thin evidence to attempt to substantiate its grand sweeping claims.
If I'm completely off-base about this book, then I wholeheartedly apologize. At this point I can only operate based on the claims made about the book by the NYT and UCP. But if I'm wrong in my assessment, and, in fact, this is a well-written study whose authors understand all of the above and have included caveats throughout explaining such... well, if I were professors Arum and Roksa, then I would be positively livid -- not only with the New York Times for painting my study in such a ridiculous light, but also with the University of Chicago Press for the patently absurd copy accompanying the book.
Why do we need to always be alarmed by the state of education today?
Instead, my concern is for the alarm-ringing, flag-waving, media-friendly BS that passes for scholarship these days.
The study, as you might guess from the title, purports to be about the "fact" that in their study of "undergraduates at two dozen universities, [they] concluded that 45 percent “demonstrated no significant gains in critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and written communications during the first two years of college.” "
I kid you not.
Why isn't this cause for concern, you may ask? Why am I not worried that nearly half of undergrads aren't improving "significantly" (whatever that means) their "broad analytic and problem-solving skills" in the first two years of undergraduate study?
You're here reading, so I'll assume you want me to tell you.
First, the study was done on 2300 undergrads at 24 institutions. Let's round that up to 2400 to be generous, and to make the math easier. That means that on average, at each of two dozen campuses, they studied 100 students. Not a bad sample size, all things considered. Except that at my undergraduate institution, that would be 0.2% of the population. I don't know if they take into account the differences between type of institutions (Community Colleges, R1s, SLACs, etc.) but I should like to know what statistical differences they found between them, as well.
Second, the study was done using the "Collegiate Learning Assessment":
...a standardized test that is essay-based and open-ended. (It is worth noting that in measuring broad analytic and problem-solving skills, the exam does not assess how much students concentrating in particular majors — physics or psychology, for example — have learned in their respective fields of study.)
It's a standardized test. Standardized tests do not, in fact, measure anything except the ability of a given student to take that particular standardized test. As far as I'm concerned, the sooner this country learns that, the better. Moving on, that little caveat (you know, that minor bit about not measuring the development of field-specific skills?) isn't so little.
One of the hardest parts of undergraduate learning is the steep difference in standards between even well-performing high schools and first-year university classes. There's a reason that most students can expect to have their marks drop by a full letter grade when they first enter undergraduate study: it's harder. That the first two years are spent trying to get up to speed in a new environment (both academic and social) alone would be enough to account for the fact that the lower-performing 45% of the students taking a standardized test don't show "significant" improvement in broad analytical skills.
That doesn't even take into account that a huge number of undergraduate programs are specialized from the get-go, meaning that the first two years are the first two years of a psychology program, or of a business program, or of an electrical engineering program -- where those years are spent, specifically, on learning to operate in a specific discipline.
Maybe a student in second-year economics won't see much improvement in broad analytical skills just yet, but I'll bet s/he'll see a pretty major improvement in her/his ability to understand economic systems.
The study purports to address this problem that "almost no one asks the fundamental question posed by Academically Adrift: are undergraduates really learning anything once they get [to college]? For a large proportion of students, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s answer to that question is a definitive no." (From the University of Chicago Press site)
Are they learning anything? Well, they aren't getting better on this one standardized test. In the first two years. Well, a little under half of them aren't. And we didn't take into account the time it takes to adapt to a new learning environment, or that what they might be working hardest on isn't broad analytical skills, but rather discipline-specific skills we don't measure. So I guess our answer is no, they aren't learning anything.
Face, meet palm.
Of course, this can all be fixed (because it's broken, don't you see?) by having students do more work:
for example, they found that 32 percent of the students whom they followed did not, in a typical semester, take “any courses with more than 40 pages of reading per week” and that 50 percent “did not take a single course in which they wrote more than 20 pages over the course of the semester.”
My God, a third of students don't take courses that require more than 40 pages of reading a week? And fully half didn't write more then twenty pages in a single class in a single semester? Sacre Dieu! It's like half of the students they polled are in the sciences or something.
Of course it's the institutions' fault. The study asks "What if at the beginning of the 21st century many colleges and universities were not focused primarily on undergraduate learning, but instead had become distracted by other institutional functions and goals?"
Yes. What if.
I have another "what if" -- what if, at the beginning of the 21st century, academics were given financial incentives to pass off this kind of alarmist pap as significant research?
This is, from what I can tell, a poorly put-together argument that loosely associates poor research findings with scapegoating accusations. It begins, like all bad science, with an intended outcome and a reason for it (read: our schools are failing us and it's Your Fault) and then uses water-thin evidence to attempt to substantiate its grand sweeping claims.
If I'm completely off-base about this book, then I wholeheartedly apologize. At this point I can only operate based on the claims made about the book by the NYT and UCP. But if I'm wrong in my assessment, and, in fact, this is a well-written study whose authors understand all of the above and have included caveats throughout explaining such... well, if I were professors Arum and Roksa, then I would be positively livid -- not only with the New York Times for painting my study in such a ridiculous light, but also with the University of Chicago Press for the patently absurd copy accompanying the book.
Why do we need to always be alarmed by the state of education today?
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