Hmm…I think I have two thoughts that come to mind. The first gauges scope (and has a lot of external processing, sorry!) and the second offers some possible pushback/a request for nuance.
First, I agree with you that Lacoste’s method may be limited insofar as there are some courses that would not be (at least currently if not on the whole) unamenable to the Starbucks style menu of course choices that he is using for his class. But, I didn’t take him to be furnishing a universal claim that this is how all courses ought to be set-up. I think that in general there may be at least some courses that can and ought to be set up in a more student controlled mode and I’m skeptical of appeals to uncertainty and implausibly as reasons to not reform systems and structures. For example, if G students learns through pictures and Y students learns through silently reading an article, and both can get to the same level of competency/ability/progress with respect to x, it seems objectionable to say to the G students “sorry, we only do Y style here” as opposed to changing the accessibility of the course to now be, well, accessible to different styles of learning. While some folks take the “well Y style is just what we do and it’s worked” or “it would just be too much time” I don’t share the intuition that these are weighty considerations as opposed to questions of values. As such, do you find less concern with a weaker as opposed to universal claim of application for Lacoste’s method?
Second, I wanted to flag something you said about Carnes. When folks say “Well, they just aren’t cut out for [insert field/class/course/profession]” it always raises a concern for me. Historically, we know that this kind of thought process was used, and is used, to both exclude women, for example, from a number of jobs and to excuse behavior that contributed their exclusion.
Common train of thoughts: Women repeatedly fail to excel in class x? They must just not be cut out for it.
What else was going on (that this common line misses): The women were often ignored, tokenized, ridiculed, etc. in the classroom and felt so excluded and unwelcome that they decided to go into another profession.
While I agree that not everyone is cut out for everything (that seems pretty tautological), I also think that it is important to name that sometimes people are cut out for [insert field/class/course/profession] but fail to excel due to the structure of the system and not due to intrinsic inability. I don’t think we can mention the former without mentioning the latter since sometimes the problem is the measure and not the person being measured.
