From this:

Soon after this study, Ong synthesized existing research into a vivid picture of the oral mind-set. Whereas literates can rotate concepts in their minds abstractly, orals embed their thoughts in stories. According to Ong, the best way to preserve ideas in the absence of writing is to “think memorable thoughts,” whose zing insures their transmission. In an oral culture, cliché and stereotype are valued, as accumulations of wisdom, and analysis is frowned upon, for putting those accumulations at risk. There’s no such concept as plagiarism, and redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument. Opponents in struggle are more memorable than calm and abstract investigations, so bards revel in name-calling and in “enthusiastic description of physical violence.” Since there’s no way to erase a mistake invisibly, as one may in writing, speakers tend not to correct themselves at all. Words have their present meanings but no older ones, and if the past seems to tell a story with values different from current ones, it is either forgotten or silently adjusted. As the scholars Jack Goody and Ian Watt observed, it is only in a literate culture that the past’s inconsistencies have to be accounted for, a process that encourages skepticism and forces history to diverge from myth.

This helps me understand some of my students. Not that it was hard to understand… some people are clearly incapable of abstract thought. Which makes them incapable of anything I would call thought. There’s not much one can do about it in a single term, especially when basic literacy is not the subject of the course.

Basically, for Gen Ed courses, I have built-in a cushion that allows such students to pass the course, if they work hard, with basic recall only. A’s and B’s require demonstration of higher cognitive skills. But I question whether one should be able to obtain a college degree of any sort with a pre-literate, or as the article calls it, oral mindset. It’s clearly quite common.