Hi Marc, I agree, 'critical thinking' is not more likely to occur in these institutions. But I do think a lot of people are not only exposed to critical theory via university (often for the first time), but are forced to engage with it via essays and discussion where an independent reader might be left much more to their own devices. It might just be my experience, but without a big dose of it for a few years, and having friends with a college experience of the same stuff for me to reflect my thought off of, I would be much less versed in it than I am now.
I spoke of it because some friends - increasingly activist - don't have much but oppositional strategies in their activism. Unpicking the workings of the discursive framework we are steeped in requires a reading that they don't have the facility to express - and not for a lack of smarts, but for their lack of exposure to the thinking that has problematised the capitalised ideas the society runs by. Oh, I read your blog when it was posted - it was great, and I forwarded it to a campaign running at the same time, fighting library cuts in Wellington, New Zealand. The campaign was mostly successful by the way, the Council was embarrassed by a series of op-ed's in the local paper into supporting no cuts here! cheers, Colin # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
