Compared to students from Latin America, Spain, or other European countries, students trained as undergraduates in US universities don't seem to have a lot of cultural capital. They can be bright and enthusiastic when they get to graduate school, but the lack of general knowledge can be a handicap. It's interesting the recent book arguing students are not learning enough in college, Academically Adrift, only talks about levels of critical thinking, a sort of context-free ability to analyze an unfamiliar problem and write about it on the spot.
Cultural capital is just having enough general knowledge of history, music, art, intellectual history, philosophy, the basic outlines of various intellectual disciplines, etc... just to be able to hold your own in the academic environment. I imagine if Academically Adrift had measured that, the results would have also been poor.
The problem is that cultural capital is not "what you learn in school." If we go back to Pierre Bourdieu, the originator of this concept, we find that this kind of "capital" is linked to class position. The analogy is to financial capital. You might not have taken a class on art appreciation, but you still know art if you belong to a certain social class. You learn things by osmosis.
Americans are more auto-didacts. We earn our learning. The education we receive is rather poor in high school, and it is possible to drift through many universities without learning very much. The Spanish major does not really provide general knowledge of this sort: it can barely give students an adequate background in Spanish and Latin American Literature.
I'm not one of the professors who gets shocked when a graduate class does not know something I think every half-way educated person should now. I'm way beyond that point. What i want to know is how to help students who don't have cultural capital, because I don't see a really quick fix. It's not a skill, but a wide background that cannot be supplied in a few months.
2 comments:
I think your use of Bourdieu's concept is exactly what he would have wanted. In fact, as I understand it, Bourdieu is very popular among teachers (and education scholars) in Europe for exactly that reason. Steve Fuller, incidentally, talks about this effect as a the "creative destruction of social capital", the process by which knowledge can redistribute power.
Reminds me of what Brodsky apparently said to a class of American undergraduates who had never heard of Ovid (let alone read him): "You have been cheated" (or something like that).
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