Throughout his diaries in 1984, Winston raises the question of how it is possible to awaken the Proles. Around these parts, we engage in nuanced analyses of ideology and raise questions of how it might be possible for subjects to depart from dominant forms of social organization. However, grading my students quizzes and critical thinking assignments, I wonder if these forms of ideological critique are not already too optimistic. In my introductory philosophy courses, I give my students very simple quizzes, designed to foster their reading skills and their ability to identify arguments. Thus, for example, I might quote a passage from their text and ask them to answer a series of questions:
In The Way Things Are, Lucretius writes:
Do listen– I don’t want you to suppose
White atoms form those white things that you see
Before your eyes, or that black objects come
From particles of black. Never believe
That any visible color is derived
From motes of that color. Basic elements
Simply do not have color, none at all,
In that respect being neither like nor unlike
The larger forms they fashion. You’d be wrong
To think imagination can’t be conceived
Of objects lacking color. Those born blind,
Who never have seen the sunlight, learn by touch
The sense of bodies, though ideas of color
Mean nothing to them, and color-concept
Is by no means absolute…All right, then: first-beginnings have no color,
But they do differ in shape, and from this cause
Arise effects of color variation.
It makes a world of difference in what order
They form their combinations, how they are held,
How give, take, interact. For example,
Things black a little while ago turn white,
All shining white, as dark sea can change
From sullen black to the shine of dancing marble
When the great winds go sweeping over the waves. (pgs. 72 – 73)1. What claim is Lucretius attempting to disprove or refute in this passage?
2. What observational evidence does Lucretius give to support his thesis that this claim is false?
3. According to Lucretius, if color (and other qualities) does not emerge from colored atoms, then what does produce these qualities? (You will find his theory in the passage).
Nothing could be more simple than such an assignment. I give the passage. I have chosen a text that minimizes Lucretius’ poetry. And I ask very simple, straightforward questions. Yet the results are astonishing and truly depressing. Many students claim that Lucretius is trying to prove that qualities like color are a product of the imagination or mind, despite the fact that the passage says nothing of the sort. In response to the second question, a number of students refer to the blind man to support the thesis that atoms do not have color– saying the blind man can “imagine” colors –despite the fact that the blind man is evoked to make a very different point. Few point to the discussion of waves, or use their knowledge of atomism developed over weeks as observational evidence. Finally, a number of students respond to question three by appealing, once again, to imagination rather than combinations.
Matters are even more depressing in my critical thinking course. When confronted with an argument like “Of course Chines green tea is good for your health. If it weren’t, how could it be so beneficial”, a large number of students claim that the writer is misplacing the burden of proof rather than making a circular argument or begging the question… This after spending weeks studying all sorts of fallacies and numerous examples of these fallacies. Admittedly, circular arguments can be extremely difficult to identify (and are disturbingly common). However, matters go further than this. When confronted with an argument such as “Perhaps Julia has a ‘university’ degree, but she just isn’t qualified for the job”, many students claim that the speaker or writer is saying something positive about Julia, failing to recognize that the square quotes denote sarcasm. When confronted with the statement “Socialized Health Care– All the compassion of the IRS with the efficiency of the U.S. Post Office”, a number of students thought the writer was speaking positively about Socialized Health Care, rather than engaging in sarcasm and ridicule… That is, there is a fundamental inability to read tone. Admittedly, the issue here might be a lack of background knowledge regarding the IRS. Yet still, the use of “efficiency” in relation to the Post Office should clue the student off.
Perhaps I am a horrible teacher, though I’m not so sure. The fact that these reading difficulties occur in both the critical thinking course and my various philosophy courses suggests something else is going on. It seems that we have a fundamentally passive relationship to language, such that language works on us rather than us reflecting on how language is seeking to affect us and mold our thought in a particular way. Reading words on a page, sounding them out, is not yet reading. Rather, to read one must pause, distance himself from what is read, and reflect on what the text is doing to ones thought. Yet this, apparently, is an incredibly difficult skill to develop. When people have very poor reading and listening skills, it is difficult to have much faith in the efficacy of nuanced ideological analyses. The most rudimentary critical thinking, reading, and listening skills aren’t even there. It terrifies me to think that we are so passive with respect to language. We become marionettes of words and speakers, without any skills to resist. Prior to being a critical thinker one must first develop critical consciousness. Such a consciousness requires a minimal distance from language. Yet how is such a distance produced? I do not know. Such things do, however, fill me with despair.
October 29, 2007 at 6:21 pm
I have a similar feeling having completed grading my first set of essays from the class I TA. Asked to merely restate a simplified version of a portion (!) of the argument of a longer essay, students are incapable of stringing together two coherent sentences. With the exception of only 1 or 2 papers out of 30, the best they seemed to be able to manage is a random regurgitation of individual sentences uttered by the professor, which they have obviously diligently noted, often verbatim. They show neither any understanding of the argument itself, nor the ability to even properly express their knowledge of it, however misconceived. One student, accidentally I presume, even ended up calling the holocaust ‘justified’ and the actions taken my SS officers ‘ok because they were just doing their jobs’. The essay they were writing on was one of Arendt’s.
While I am generally resistant to the theory that increasing distractions like video games and television are detrimental to child development, I can’t help but speculate that only an utter lack of reading practice could make students so insensitive to the use of language in formal argument. How can I tell them they are wrong, when their ‘ideas’ come straight from the prof’s mouth? The best I can do is to continually mark, ‘doesn’t follow’ and ‘explain’. I predict the students will not be satisfied with these comments as an explanation for their C’s and D’s.
October 29, 2007 at 6:37 pm
I agree that a large part of the issue is that we just aren’t readers anymore. I am, however, sympathetic to the argument that thought develops differently in a universe characterized by images and hyperlinks rather than text. I don’t know that I would describe this as detrimental, so much as “different”. Plato, of course, moaned about the detrimental effects of writing as the Greeks moved from an oral culture to a written culture. Yet writing made a number of things possible that weren’t before possible: high order mathematics, science, philosophy. Hopefully a culture of the image will engender similar potentialities and possibilities; though so far it seems that it is producing drones.
October 29, 2007 at 8:31 pm
Imagine how painful it is for some of us students to sit through the discussions that lead up to those quizzes. A significant portion of the student body seems not to understand the purpose of office hours for asking irrelevant questions.
October 29, 2007 at 8:40 pm
I tend to think these sorts of skills are deceptively complex – and that a great deal of background is required in order for students to have a sufficient sensitivity to context, in order for the more abstract logical or critical thinking categories to become available or “deployable”. Immense socialisation – above and beyond facility with reading in general – is required for students to be able to hear tone within the context of a specific kind of literature.
I’m often confronted by this myself, when beginning to read entirely new literatures – it hits me differently, of course, because I know, having had practice tackling fundamentally new sorts of literatures in the past, that tone and reference will be an issue. But it’s still not unusual for me to confronted with a great deal of uncertainty over the tone or the intention of a piece: this can remain extremely opaque, even for readers with decent abstract skills, until the reader obtains some sort of immersion in a particular discursive context.
Of course this is accentuated by students general lack of familiarity with reading, and with the specific kind of attentive reading required for philosophical or theoretical texts, or with the specific kind of criticism being asked for in a critical thinking course. But in a way I’m much less depressed by this sort of thing, because it doesn’t surprise me that it needs to be very actively apprenticed: these are trained and socialised dispositions and, although crucially important and foundational, not really “rudimentary” in the sense that I would expect students to take easily to these skills…
Maybe my expectations are too low :-) Or else I struggle to an unusual degree with such things myself, and am therefore over-sympathetic…
October 29, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Moses, I think this is a good point. There seem to be a handful of students that are adept at these skills and take to it naturally. I am not sure whether this is the result of an apprenticeship as N.P. suggests, or something else. I do think the decline in reading overall plays a big roll in this phenomenon. Floyd’s observations closely parallel my own. The difficulty with office hours is that students often do not even know what questions to ask. A good analogy might be visiting or moving to a new city for the very first time. Initially everything appears as a buzzing confusion as places and destinations have not yet been differentiated or distinguished from noise. It all seems equally relevant and irrelevant, and thus is experienced as something akin to fuzz on a television station not tuned into a channel. Over time certain things are rendered salient and the rest are relegated to the background as noise. I get the sense that many students lack the foundations that would allow them to distinguish noise in a text from what is salient in a text and therefore unable to even formulate questions that would guide them through a text or pick up [Ariadne's] thread.
Pedagogically I am unsure how this difficulty can be surmounted. So much of our familiarity with texts is of the order of background knowledge or a habitus that is the result of our education, writing, and having worked with countless texts. It is difficult to formulate clear-cut rules that would allow the student, approaching this sort of material and thought for the very first time, to navigate these sorts of texts. The case is similar in teaching formal logic. How do you explain where to begin or which operations to do first when doing a formal proof? There are no hard and fast rules for solving a proof. Rather, over time you develop a sort of know-how or intuition that gives you a sense of where to begin with a specific problem.
Generally I have a very dialogical approach to teaching. Rather than simply stating the philosopher’s “theories”, I instead attempt to recreate problems and questions. I find that once students understand problems and questions they are able to come to very similar conclusions and concepts. There is a sort of syntax or grammar that emerges in relation to a problem or question: an immanent logic. This helps in gaining access to a philosopher, however it doesn’t mitigate the difficulties students have in navigating texts, where basic language skills and reading comprehension skills or lacking. For instance, some students might find the passage from Lucretius above difficult simply because it doesn’t register that the word “mote” is a synonym for “atom”, or because they have never been taught basic premise and argument indicators such as “never believe…” or “if this were not the case, then…” I have even discovered that the very concept of an argument is foreign to most of my students. They simply have never been taught that an argument is a claim supported by reasons; and immediately think of arguments as disagreements between two people where one belief is opposed to another belief. I cannot help but think that a good deal of this goes back to how highschool English is currently being taught in the States.
October 29, 2007 at 9:53 pm
I’d tend to agree with N. Pepperell about this. I know my own personal experience has shown me that it takes a lot of apprenticeship and practice in order to really get to the arguments of a text and truly read, and it’s only in the past few years that I think I’ve been able to do that. I can see it in other students too, even students who are ostensibly smart and well-educated. They just have difficulty being critical and self-reflexive and pulling an argument out; at best they resort to the points in a text where the author summarizes, but are unable to give any real argument for why such a position should be supported.
Your post also reminds of this rather frightening editorial I read once on MSNBC:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14823087/
The belief that the value of reading is reducible to it’s function in an economic system is kinda scary, and hopefully one that’s not too widespread! Anyways, good to have you writing again, Sinthome.
Cheers,
-Nick
October 31, 2007 at 7:22 pm
[...] 31st, 2007 by Shahar Ozeri This post over at Larval Subjects muses about a general passivity with regards to language. In this post by [...]
November 2, 2007 at 1:22 pm
[...] and interesting response/diagnosis to student malaise (as well as some of the issues raised here, here and here): In light of the foregoing, it seems that we are faced with two possible pedagogies. If [...]
November 11, 2007 at 3:23 am
Now…
November 11, 2007 at 3:35 am
Now… I see…
I mean, I used to think of this in terms of of a deficit in their education, the poverty of their reading experience… but conceiving this as itself a passion–a passion away from the making of distinctions, a passion for ignorance…
Throws a new light on everything… yes, it’s true. More than something missing in their education–a force in itself. A force embedded deep in our language…
…scares the shit out of me
November 21, 2007 at 10:30 pm
I sympathize with this. I mean, it’s so easy to be concerned about the “ideological struggle” between the different social groups–then you realize (as I have, when I taught a Composition course last year, which, let’s just say, expected far less of students than your intro Philo courses) that even just at the point of reception/perception, there are already gross problems. Then you remember, oh yah, wait, most people don’t even give a damn about these things, don’t even want to (mass)think . . . :-(