The Education Vector

Transcribed from the printed issue; not yet reviewed. Read it in the PDF of the issue, page 17

The Education Vector¶

January 1996

Editor Ian Clark

This Education Vector has been reprinted from VECTOR Vol.12 No.3. VECTOR is the Quarterly Journal of the British APL Association. For more information about the British APL Association, please contact: Sylvia Camacho, [address and telephone number omitted].

Contents¶

Ian Clark
IAC/Human Interfaces,
[address, telephone number and e-mail address omitted]

Editorial¶

My last editorial ("Raising Standards — or Flying Kites") prompted some Internet correspondence. Since it was much more interesting than anything I could write in this issue, I reprint the most thought-provoking letter, together with my reply (both edited).

(Nick Cox, of Durham University, writes:)

Your opinions do not tally with the evidence known to me or with my experience in what happens to be the university down the road from you. I am taking you seriously and will therefore have misunderstood you if what you intended was merely a provocative musing aloud, somewhat tongue in cheek.

The (quote:) "more sought-after universities" include some of the older traditional universities such as Durham. The evidence coming out from Teaching Quality Assessments is that on the whole these have better teaching than elsewhere, particularly better than the newest universities. Numbers and quality of staff are typically better and resources much better, and at least some staff retain very high dedication to teaching (often at some considerable personal cost to their career advancement). Your innuendo is entirely inaccurate about many people of this kind. It also misses the point that we have a contractual obligation to both teaching and research, not just teaching.

Low correlation between achievement at around 18 and that at around 21 is an important puzzle and I do not have a glib explanation for it. But in effect we are analyzing relatively narrow bands, which raises the possibility of a statistical artefact. If you take height and weight data only for (say) the very tallest, the correlation will be much lower than for the population as a whole. In addition, many students experience very different styles of teaching at university compared with school, and it is hardly surprising that they make different progress and often leap-frog each other. The absorbers at school may be very poor arguers and analysers, to mention just one example. I would be interested in an analysis of performance at 18 compared with 15.

Far from being ruthless to losers, this university devotes considerable time to the idle and those incapable of minimal self-organisation, as well to casualties who deserve the sympathy and consideration they get. Its drop-out rate is accordingly very low. I am not clear whether you would regard that as a good thing.

I find it difficult to reconcile your cynicism about this region only needing one university with your cynicism about excluding a majority of the population from tertiary education. Even if the North-East should turn out to be a net exporter of graduates, that still amounts to a major contribution to the outside world and a major source of employment in the region (not to mention scientific and cultural contributions and so forth). Why sneer at that?

(Ian Clark replies:)

Although you've obviously taken hurt at the things I wrote, I don't essentially disagree with a word you say. Yes, I was being provocative and "tongue in cheek", but I do feel deeply about the things I was writing. So — yes, I want to be taken seriously, but maybe you've got me wrong.

I stand by my central argument that the traditional elitism of Gillian Shephard (the UK Minister for Education) braying about "standards" is an inappropriate answer to the questions posed by poor uptake of university places in science, technology and mathematics. But to answer them needs a book, not an editorial.

Yes, I know all too well how zeal for the quality of one's own teaching, or even worse, trying to improve your school's teaching methods, is to risk your own advancement inside your establishment. My one-time boss, an applied mathematician of the old brigade, once told me that I should be busy enhancing my personal research status and that of the school, not bothering with all that stuff. He was referring to new methods I was promoting on the old HND Computing-A option (which thanks to my human factors research experience I could actually make work). I suppose I upset him by referring to myself as an ex-mathematician — implying that its didactic traditions contributed nothing to the effective uptake of the principles it pretended to deliver. Gauss was called "the old fox who covered his tracks" (meaning that the was careful to expunge from his proofs all evidence of how he arrived at them). His tradition is still upheld. It's not exactly student-friendly, but it certainly cuts a dash.

I can imagine that you, like me, have spent much time and agony over your students. Perhaps more, in hindsight, than some of them deserved. But I resent it only for a very small proportion (my suggested <5%, for which sensible selection methods might possibly be developed to detect). High drop-out rates are often attributed to poor selection procedures. Illogically the converse is often inferred. But I know, and you know, that low drop-out rates have more to do with caring for one's students, than being in the happy position to skim the "cream" of candidates (whatever that is, beyond the flotsam of culture and privilege).

The conscientious teacher of his or her students was the last person I wanted to attack. At Durham, in particular, I have had close contact with staff in many different departments, in a variety of capacities as it happens. Please treat my remarks about what is open the the "more sought-after universities" as describing a standing temptation rather than a pervasive vice, as far as Durham is concerned. If Sodom and Gomorrah had boasted half as many just men the cities wouldn't have got burnt.

Does the North-East (of England) really need all its universities? You're right to perceive a threat here, one which has been uttered in other quarters. But it's really a different question to "does the UK — or the world even — need the N-E universities?" and different again to "do they enhance the region — or the world?"

I've seen the N-E described as a "branch-factory economy". People don't "get on" by moving there and it's not where the big decisions are made. Nationwide organisations treat it as a penal colony for their managers. So how many graduates do the five N-E universities need to produce to fill vacant responsible posts in the N-E? Enough to keep just one of them open? I doubt even that.

But that's not the point. Perhaps I should have italicised "purely to serve the region's needs", but I had hoped that spouting free-market economics ("massive overcapacity...!") in the context of centres of learning and excellence would be instantly recognised as heavy irony. But not as sneering at the region's achievements. I suppose I reckoned without the fact that there are people in power who really do think like Mr Muckybrass. So many that I can virtually lift Rattigan's manifesto out of "Basil the Great Mouse Detective" and people will think I'm not joking.

Some Articles in the Current Vector¶