I've been enjoying Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe. The core of his argument is that colleges are doing a poor job of teaching, for at least two reasons. First, they fail to explain the culture of scholarship to students, thus leaving the students unsure of what and how to learn. Second, Graff feels that academia does a poor job of reaching out to the bigger world, of transmitting its most important lessons, which are about the value of argument-- i.e.,
…summarizing the claims of others, sticking with a summary to unpack its key implications and premises, weighing evidence, spotting and identifying contradictions and non sequiturs, telling stories and devising examples that exemplify one's point, generalizing one's conclusions, and many other practices that come into play in every field. (p. 22)