Tuesday, April 10, 2012

What a Shocker: College Makes Students Less Interested in Interracial Understanding

From April 10, 2012 Inside Higher Education:
A new study being presented at this year's annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association suggests that as undergraduates progress in higher education, they become less interested, on average, in promoting racial understanding. The study finds that this is true across racial groups -- although it finds some characteristics of the college experience that may make students more interested in racial understanding as they proceed from freshman to senior year.
Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/04/10/study-suggests-students-grow-less-interested-promoting-racial-understanding#ixzz1reN1xOEO Inside Higher Ed 
I can't claim to be surprised.  Many years ago, when my wife was in grad school, she was a TA in an English literature class.  She did a presentation about Samuel Johnson's "A Brief to Free a Slave."  She had a couple of students argue that perhaps slavery was "right for that culture."  Perhaps this was a cynical application of the multiculturalist nonsense to a subject where, to be blunt, white students get continually hammered about how they should feel responsible for actions taken by other whites centuries ago against blacks who are also dead for centuries.

1 comment:

  1. I'm not quite sure how to phrase this, so I'm just going to be blunt with it- maybe students aren't interested in the administration's (and the study's authors) ideas about & version of racial understanding. Most kids I know around college age really don't give a hoot what "race" someone is. They don't perceive one person as black, another as Latino, etc. They simply see them as people and don't get all the excitement about it.

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