Wednesday, April 13, 2016

University Education - An oxy-moron?



 The Walrus is, in my mind, a very fine Canadian magazine. The selection of topics is somewhat uneven - perhaps more so under the current editor than in the past, but the quality of writing is generally quite wonderful.  On occasion there is an article that is so on point that I feel compelled to suggest that others read it. In the April edition, there is such an article. It should be required reading for every potential post secondary student and their parents as well as every professor and administrator in our post-secondary system.

Ron Srigley, a professor (tenured I assume) from the University of Prince Edward Island has written a harsh condemnation of our universities. In clear prose, Srigley's frustration of working for an institution that focuses on the lowest common denominator both in terms of cost and academic performance, and that continually lowers the expectations of what  students should be learning  is obvious from the first paragraph. He argues that universities have transitioned from a place where learning is valued to a consumer based institution where the customer is always right and is therefore pandered to. There is little in his essay that I can disagree with. His comments as to the number of staff with MEds (master of education) who frequently teach topics that they are not qualified for, the ever increasing focus on keeping the classroom entertaining and the denigration of scholarship rang loud bells for me. They were some of the reasons why I left teaching at the community college. But I think he avoided the question as to why or how we got ourselves into this mess.

At some point in the mid 1960s, in response to the pressure from the  baby boomers who were about to graduate from high school and the new awareness on the status of white color professionals, the provincial governments created new universities and expanded the old ones. It was not that everyone went to university - I think only a handful of kids from my grade 11 class went, but more lower-middle class kids went to university than at any other time. Teachers, who up to that time had not needed a B.A. to teach high school - now did. Some companies started to give preference to graduates from a university - on the assumption that they could both read and write better and that they had an expanded view of the world. I suspect in 1970 that was generally true. However, during the next thirty or so years, universities and society's expectations of those institutions evolved in a very strange direction.  I think there were three reasons:

One - companies with no clear understanding of what people were being taught in university started to demand a general BA as the basic requirement for an entry level position. Secondly - universities because of the expansion, now needed to find ways of keeping the classrooms full (and thereby keep their government funding) . Thirdly society shifted from the belief that post-secondary education was privilege reserved for the very bright and the affluent to the belief that every person had the right to get a post secondary education regardless of their capacity.
In our desire to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to further their education, I think we have become confused as to the difference between ensuring that (1) post-secondary education is accessible to all and  (2) that everyone should be able to go to post secondary institution.   The former concept suggests that we need to ensure that there are no barriers including class, race or gender that prevent children from aspiring to go and going to university. The latter concept says the post-secondary is a right that everyone has. Because society gradually has assumed the latter to be true, universities have become places that young adults go because they are suppose to go somewhere. If the primary goal of the institution is to keep the young person there, it follows that we will do all that we can to make a comfortable and easy place to be for the three or four years. What the student learns there is somewhat irrelevant. While it is tempting to, as does Professor Srigley, to blame the university for this watering down of our post secondary education - the fault in fact lies at least partially elsewhere.

Over that thirty year period companies increased the level of education required - perhaps under the mistaken belief that they could reduce staff training costs. High school teachers encouraged their students to go on, even when they knew that many of the students lacked either the skills or even a viable career path. Parents, perhaps originally because of the status of have an offspring in university and later the shame of not having one there, demanded that the high school award marks high enough to get into a university. And perhaps worst  of all, the schools, the parents and the students all allowed themselves to believe that learning was not hard work.  

It would seem to me that if we want a universities to actually teach something, then we need to value the process of education, not just the piece of paper at the end of it all.

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