The US as Seen from Paris

     Daniel Hardin justifies the "incuriousity" of American students, which David Pike commented on. His response:
     "It is not required that every student, on the basis of his payment of tuition, should 'set the record straight' on every issue the professor mentions. Back in the late 1950s I took some political science classes at the University of Minnesota from Mulford Q. Sibley, now long gone. He at the time was a flaming socialist and would permit, certain students in strange costume (some of us referred to them as Bulgarian bomb throwers) to rant for 15 minutes at a time on the evils of the United Fruit Company. Though the evils of UFC may have been true enough, the credit to be earned was in political theory and not UFC.
     Second, many students who could bring up quite interested approaches to issues do not do so because of the prevailing political correctness climate on many campuses. If a student develops a reputations as having reservations about the usual leftist slogans they may well be penalized."


     My comment: I agree entirely, but this is one more argument in favor of replacing formal lectures with documentary films, which if good are better and more informative than any lecture. Discussions are a separate issue. However, David Pike was talking about getting perspectives from different countries, which is a WAIS exercise.


     "I am going to talk of academic incuriosity, or call it by its older name, provincialism. In the seminars I attended last month, when the students presented themselves to the class, every single one of them was either American or American-educated. It was possible for a professor to speak to them in a manner that would not survive five minutes in a class of mine, where a Russian or a Japanese or an Australian would have his hand up in a minute: "Sir, with all due respect, that's not how we understand the situation back home."

Ronald Hilton - 5/1/00