THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY.

(Disambiguation. For the (presumably (I don't know I haven't read it)) dull and lengthy 19th century treatise of the same name go to JH Newman: The Idea of a University.)

1. What happened.

I was looking forward to going to University. Really I was! I was so convinced it would be completely different from school. And I was really disappointed. In fact I hated it from beginning to end. Sorry but I just did!

The only reason I didn't drop out was because (like Richard Nixon) I have never been a quitter. And also because if I had dropped out then I would have spent (in my ignorance of what it was like) forever regretting doing so.

2. Why it happened.

The reason I hated it was because I got nothing out of it that I was expecting. That I was perfectly reasonably expecting. And, more importantly, I didn't (and still can't) see how I (or anyone else) could get from it what I was expecting.

What I was expecting was some kind of "being taught" or at the very least "being helped to learn". I don't mean I would be passive in that process. But that there would be some other people being active in somehow positively affecting my learning activity. In a quite sophisticated way. Isn't that what an educational institution is there for? Certainly there was not very much of that going on at school. And it seemed reasonable for me to think that I would find it at University. That being a more mature and developed educational institution.

One advantage I expected would be that it would not contain any students who didn't really want to be there. This sort of attitude was common at school because school is compulsory but University is optional. So I figured there wouldn't be anybody there who was just attending classes in that perfunctory way they did at school just to get to the end because they had to be there. But I was wrong about this. Most students were like that! Even the ones studying non-vocational courses where the motive was not purely as a means to a (financial) end. Once the exams were over everyone was so relieved it was finished and the library became empty. But if you like English literature or Philosophy or the history of the French Revolution then wouldn't you spend as much time in the library reading about these things after the exams as you did before? I know I did!

3. Lectures ancient.

So why didn't I find what I wanted at University? The basic problem was that the main method of teaching was the lecture.

Now, the only reason that lectures are the main method of teaching at Universities is because Universities were invented before the printing press. Sounds crazy but it's true. Absolutely it is! In the 13th century pretty much the only way to learn about some academic type subject to a fairly advanced standard was to physically take yourself to somewhere where there were people who knew about whatever you wanted to learn about and to listen to them with your own ears. You couldn't dial them up on the interweb. You couldn't buy one of their (printed) books at Waterstones or off Amazon.

4. Lectures ineffective.

But teaching by lectures is mind-bogglingly inefficient. Just think about it.

First. I would wake up in the morning drag a comb across my head all that kind of stuff and then leave the house and make my way to a large room with someone at the front reading to me. And I would think: well why didn't you print out what you're reading and post it to me and save me the journey. Wouldn't that save a lot of time and effort? OK you couldn't do it in Oxford in 1242 but you can do it now. So do it!

Second. Aren't you more likely to understand something if it's written down than if it's being said to you? If the lecture is about something fairly factual like history or biology then maybe it doesn't matter. But if it's about maths or physics or philosophy or anything which needs you to follow a complicated chain of reasoning then it's better if you've got it written down in front of you. If it's being read out to you in a lecture and you lose the thread of the argument then that's it the rest of the lecture is gone. You end up frantically transcribing what the lecturer is saying so you can read it at your leisure later on. Because reading is better. If you're reading and you lose the thread then that's OK you just turn back the page. Or you might need to stop and think about a particular step of the argument. But you can't tell the lecturer to pause just for you.

Third. How much can you fit into a lecture? All other things being equal, the rate at which you can read straightforward material is greater than the rate at which a lecturer can read it out to you (while maintaining clear diction). I measured it once. Reading out loud clearly is about 170 wpm (words per minute). Reading to myself I can do about 330 wpm. ... So, in terms of content, lectures could give you only a tiny proportion (if any) of the learning that you need to get your degree. If you knew only what you had heard in lectures you'd fail miserably. In other words almost all of the stuff you need to know to get a degree you have to learn yourself. In which case why go to a University? Would you take your car to the auto repair garage and fix it yourself?

I found one person who agrees with me hooray!

Also this quote from John Holt: "We ask children to do for most of a day what few adults are able to do even for an hour. How many of us, attending, say, a lecture that doesn't interest us, can keep our minds from wandering?"

5. Lectures: opinions about.

And some people have the nerve to try and defend lectures. How annoying! They say that it's not just sitting and listening at a lecture: you can ask questions. To which I say what rubbish of course you can't! What, there's twenty or thirty other people there and I'm going to ask about something that I don't understand and expect everyone else who does understand it to sit and wait? What if everyone did that? In a 60 minute lecture even if there were only 20 people there and they asked only one question each and got their answer and all this took 2 minutes each that's 40 minutes gone. ... Also I don't know about you but when there's something I don't understand about something complicated it takes me quite a long time to (so to speak) figure out what I don't understand and formulate it into a question. So should I have said in a lecture: can you wait a minute please while I formulate my question. That's silly! In my last year I kind of persuaded one of the lecturers to let me ask questions at the beginning of a lecture which were about the previous lecture. Thus giving me a week to formulate a clearly expressed question. That kind of worked.

I mean I know that it's a staple (allegedly) of the format of teaching at educational establishments (schoolroom classes etc). The teacher says: if you don't understand please ask. They're lying about that! Actually they don't want you to ask. If they really wanted you to ask questions then the lesson would be set up in that format. You'd have some kind of formal set up where certain hours would be set aside for you to ask questions. There might even be an appointment system where you could book 10 minutes with a teacher to ask what you want. But there isn't. Which shows they're not that serious about it. ... The standard classroom scenario is teacher at the front explaining something and then they'll say: "OK does everybody understand what I've said so far. If anybody doesn't then please ask now. Don't be afraid to speak up". At which point you feel like saying to the teacher: if you really want people to ask then don't make them speak up in front of everyone else! Don't you know that children don't like drawing attention to themselves? Isn't that just obvious? Like anybody's going to say, "I don't understand that bit: look how dumb I am guys: I don't even understand that bit!" ... Teachers don't seem to understand that most pupils spend their time in a state of being "bored, confused and afraid" (to quote John Holt). There are a few children who don't suffer from this. They're the children who go on to be teachers. In other words teachers are that tiny minority of the population who don't understand what every other student feels (=hates) about going to school.

So I hated the idea of lectures. But I hated more the fact that nobody else (staff or students) even commented on this glaring enormous piece of rubbish. And that when I mentioned it they looked at me like I'd just tipped a bucket of cold vomit over their heads. And I still don't know why. Why lectures have persisted to this day is utterly incomprehensible to me. The cynical answer is that it's about self-preservation: if a University admits lectures are pointless then it ceases to exist. Or maybe it's a test. To see if anybody dared to speak up. A variation on "The Emperor's New Clothes" story or some test run by Stanley Milgram.

6. Teaching besides lectures.

And there wasn't really very much more than lectures. You'd get a couple of lines feedback per essay. Which was pretty worthless. And sometimes a lecturer would say if you have any questions you can "come up and see me sometime". Again: very impractical. What if everybody had taken them up on that offer? Actually very few people did. I was one that did but gave up after a while. I'd go to the lecturer's room and they'd be busy. I'd be sat outside for a while. And then once inside I'd ask something. And they'd answer with a lecture. A meandering lecture. Like they've been lecturing for so long that that is the only form of speech that they're capable of. Normal conversational dialogue which requires actual listening and trying to understand someone who doesn't understand. That kind of talking is alien to them. And then they'd say sorry I have to dash.

Rather than 10 hours of lectures a week I would have been happy with one hour a month of personal attention. It’s like they were doing something for me, ie giving me lectures, that I don’t want them to do for me because I can do for myself. And the thing that I did want them to do for me they don’t do.

7. Exams.

There are two parts to education. The first is the teaching. The second is some kind of assessment so that the learner gets an accurate objective measure of how much and how well they have learnt the material. The two main forms of assessment at university were essays and lectures.

Neither of these were accurate measures. You didn't write an essay about everything you had learnt. And in the examination you didn't get asked about everything. You could choose which questions to answer. So, if you knew only 40% of the material, and in an exam chose to answer only the questions which were about this 40% and answered those questions perfectly you could probably get 100% exam result. Which suggests (falsely) that you know everything.

Also the final measure of all your efforts was one of five grades (from "first" to "ordinary"). So you work for three years and the measure of how well you did is a number between 1 and 5. What if you had a complete medical examination and you went to get your results from the doctor and he said "3 out of 5". You'd want to know more than that. Quantitatively you'd want it (at the very least) to be a number out of 100. And you'd want some qualitative measure too.

Why isn't the pass mark of an exam 100%? If you were hiring a mechanic to fix your car and they said they'd got 80% in their mechanics exams you wouldn't hire them. Because what your car needs doing to it might be one of the 20% of things they don't know. And if they said they'd got 100% you'd hope that the exam tested them on everything and not just 40%.

8. Baffling conclusions (sort of).

The consequent conclusion to my University career was: I started out doing Maths and Philosophy but the people running the Maths course very quickly threw me out in exasperation at my apparent inability. (Strangely they didn't (like I was doing) scratch their heads and ask themselves: how can someone who got a grade A at A-level be so bloody  useless?) That's the point at which I could have dropped out but instead I just stuck with what I had left which was Philosophy.

Then there's the conclusion(s) I drew in my mind about what was going on. I asked myself: given everything that's happened and what I've experienced so far what can I conclude about what is actually going on? (By the way that's a good question to ask in general about any situation that you find yourself in: "what's actually going on here?". You can't deal with a situation until you properly understand it.)

Conclusion 1. In the absence of any substantial teaching going on students teach themselves I suppose. (If that's true then they are a lot more clever than I am!) This isn't as strange a conclusion as it sounds. Lots of educational establishments admit they are useless by having entrance exams. Which in effect say that they only want to teach people who are clever enough learn themselves. Like some garage that only fixes cars with minor problems. Anything that's going to take a lot of effort to fix: they're not interested. (They will always come out number 1 on any list of garages with the best results.) So some schools say: we only want clever pupils.

Conclusion 2. Students don't get taught and they don't learn it themselves either. All that happens is that they get exam results that say they know their stuff when actually they don't. That's certainly what happened to me. I've got a piece of paper saying I did this very well but really what I know about Philosophy you could write on the back of a postage stamp. It's like you take your car to the garage and they don't fix it but they say they have. And so you trundle it back home, leave it there and walk. Yes I know, this conclusion is even crazier than the previous one! (Don't blame me, I'm just writing this down.)

9. The cost of it all.

And I haven't said anything about the cost yet. A university year was 30 weeks (actually less than that because the last few weeks were taken up with exams). When I was at University everything was paid for. (Note my avoidance of the word "free". Education has never been free. There is a distinction between "free" and "paid for by someone else". Sunshine is "free". Education is "paid for by someone else". Unless of course the teachers, the school maintenance employees, the people who write textbooks. Unless all those people are doing it in their spare time.)

It was so easy in those days that I wasn't even aware of the fact that my Local Authority was paying tuition fees to the University or how much they were paying. (Although I did know they were paying me a maintenance grant.) ... I think the current (December 2010) tuition fees max is £3,225. So if you're a student now then whatever you're getting it's costing at least £100 a week. Students ask yourselves: is what you're getting worth that? I think that the answer is no. Especially for courses like maths, humanities, social sciences which don't require any materials as such. (Obviously courses like engineering will be different but then I think they cost more anyway.) For those courses you're paying £100 a week basically for someone to read to you.

10. The academic staff.

Let me make it clear that none of the above implies that I blamed the lecturers. They were just part of the setup. In fact the enthusiasm and love of the subject displayed by the lecturers was one of the things that kept me going.

If you were an expert in mathematics field and were intensly interested in the cutting edge of the latest discoveries in your field of mathematics the last thing you want to do is to sit there teaching people elementary arithmetic. How awful must that be! So, very understandably, the content of the lecturers courses would tend to be biased towards their own interests. Almost as if they were trying out their new ideas with us. Although this was clearly wrong. Like a mathematician might get the latest attempts at proving Fermat's Last Theorem and running them by some secondary school maths pupils. OK it wasn't that bad but sometimes it was close.

And just because you're an expert in your field doesn't mean you're going to be any good at teaching the basics. (I'm (pretty much) an expert in speaking English but that doesn't mean I could teach anybody how to speak it.) In fact you would be singularly bad at it because the basics would be something that you do without thinking. When you do something fluently you do it without thinking what you're doing exactly. But to teach someone how to do something you need to tell them how to do it exactly, so you need to know how you're doing it exactly. Does that make sense?

University teachers are not professional teachers. They just went up the ladder from undergraduate to postgraduate. As far as I know you don't have to have any formal teaching qualification to be a lecturer/teacher at University.

11. So what?

To all of which you might well say. OK smart arse. What were you expecting. Well I thought that instead of teaching us the material of the course what would happen would be that we'd learn how to learn. So I'd learn how to read difficult texts. The abstract skills of talking and arguing and reading and writing. Which would be done through one to one communication. I would gladly have exchanged 10 hours of lectures for one hour of one to one time with a proper teacher.

12. Missing the point.

People say to me that I was missing the point. Being at university is as much about the non-academic stuff like socialising. Which is true. In fact when you think about it the potential is amazing.

It's like all kinds of people from all over the country (and other bits of the world) are brought together for your convenience to meet up with. It's like a mini-melting pot ("big enough to take the world and all it's got"). When else does that ever happen? So yes it's a great opportunity. But it wasn't explicitly declared as such. And I don't do implicit! So I missed out on this dammit. It's so important it should have been made more formal. There should have been an abstract "meet other people" society. As it was people just chose to mix with people of their own sort. (Although that doesn't make sense either: just because someone likes what you like doesn't mean you're going to like them.) So the people who liked collecting spoons joined the Spoon Collecting Society (Spoonsoc) and the people who liked Highfiving joined the Highfiving Society (High5Soc). People say: if you want to meet people then join a club/society. It's like nobody wants to admit that they want to meet people just for the sake of meeting people. We have to pretend we want to meet them to discuss some particular matter of mutual interest. What's that about? And if you do it that way then how do you ever meet different people. I might think that collecting spoons sucks but I'd be interested in meeting spoon-collectors anyway. So I'd join SpoonSoc and I'd have a hard time persuading them to talk about anything else apart from spoons: they absolutely will not do it!

So I guess the only sensible students were the ones who were using the opportunity (away from their parents) to indulge in lots of sex and drugs. This is demonstrated by the fact that students often choose a University about 40 miles away from their parents' home. (Despite the fact that there is almost certainly a University closer to them that provides whatever course it is they are doing.) Too far to daily commute and too far to fall within the disapproving gaze of your parents. But near enough to visit at the weekend to get the washing done and get some decent food.

[27 December 2010]