I
disagree with the whole way
tertiary education works... at least at the moment in
Australia.
I have
attended
university, done
great in some subjects,
bombed abysmally in others. In both
cases, there are
subjects where I didn't
deserve the
grades I got, and others where I did. I have had
good teachers,
bad teachers,
indifferent and
evil teachers. I have
battled with uni
bureaucracy and the
drunken uni student mindset.
I did my best and failed abysmally.
But the
fault is not all mine.
Step back a bit and look at the whole
system. In
primary and
secondary schools,
teachers are
trained to
teach. They get
fired or
hired into the
public school system (mostly) if they
suck at teaching.
Education is
compulsory, with the result that most
people leave
school knowing how to read.
Class sizes are kept down, and you learn
useful things.
Contrast this with a typical
university.
Funding for universities
bleeds away constantly, drained by a
government that would rather get a
pay rise than invest in
the future of the nation.
Class sizes are
huge, or else their
subjects get
scrapped. You almost never get to talk to your teach...erm, that is,
lecturer, because all they ever do is blare at you (and 600 other people). You are
expected to write down _everything_ in that
subject -
flawlessly - and later
study your
notes
successfully, despite the fact that half of your
lecturers have
English as a second or
third language and/or speak at 200
words per
minute.
Courses are
inflexible, you cannot
learn what you need to... and every
university invents it's own,
mutually contradictory course
curriculum, course materials and
subjects
covered. Your lecturers are (sometimes)
experts in their
field, but by no means can the
majority teach to save themselves... they walk in, draw crap on the
OHP, dribble about their
subject and leave without ever once thinking 'how can I TEACH my
students this or that
concept?'.
Or so it seems.
IMHO, the
university system is
better than nothing, but there must be
a better way to teach than this, surely? We live in the
future, and the whole uni concept is
outdated and
wrong.
Thank you for listening, ladies and gentlemen. (And some
Everything noders.)