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Varsity Blues (NEW CONCEPTS)
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Mick Harper
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Varsity Blues

To combine Tales From The Real World and our ongoing struggle against academic orthodoxy, I thought we might report on our personal experiences of University. Those of you who didn't manage to get into university might wish to tell us how you couldn't care less, that the University of Life is what's important and why this never entirely convinces.

This latter is quite important since, in Britain, where higher education is undertaken by fifty per cent of the age-group and costs an arm-and-a-leg, there are the first glimmerings of eighteen-year-olds actually regarding not-going-to-university as something to brag about.
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Mick Harper
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My first Big Lesson in the true realities of universities was the respective fates meted out at the end of the first year to me and my mate.

I was doing Politics, which involved going to two lectures a week, doing two essays a term, posing in the coffee bar, waffling through some exams, getting a point above the pass mark and on to Year Two.

My mate was doing Mechanical Engineering, which involved disappearing into Science City all day, every day, scribbling away all night, every night, failing his exams by one point, and being slung out.

So I realised that university had two functions:
1. To select out the "ruling class" who were expected to learn nothing except how to pose convincingly and feel effortlessly superior.
2. To select out the "artificer class" who were expected to hoover up vast amounts of information in order to keep the ship of state running.

Actually, not a bad system now I come to think about it.
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Bronwyn



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OK, I'll play.....
Having been accepted to college at age 16 (I went to the same private school as John Kerry although different decades), and off that summer at the ripe old age of 17 yrs 1 month, I was a bit too young to really deal with the whole experience. The U.S. drinking age was 18 and it was a royal pain to wait a year. I felt I was academically ready for both classes and the student pub. I boldly raised my mug of pale American beer and declared myself an Art Major. What a fricking idiot thing to do! Who knew that the nerds in the computer building were destined to rule the world.

Hind-sight, being 20-20, has shown me that I wasted GOLDEN YEARS THAT MY PARENTS WERE PAYING FOR partying and whooping it up. Now that I've done it all over again (and paid for it myself), I find that I want more. Education has become a desire, almost a drug that I am consumed by. Has anyone else returned to school again?
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Mick Harper
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Yes, I did. In my thirties, I signed up to do a part-time MA in Political Economy at an ex-Poly in London. I was utterly shocked to find that "teaching" consisted of a single non-stop three-hour lecture from some MittleEuropean who was barely comprehensible. I was even more shocked to discover that the room was packed, and in dead silence, week after week. (Including me, I suppose.)

Anyway, we were required to turn in two dissertations at the end of the year: one on the difference between Keynesian and Chicago Economics, the other the differences between Tsarist and Soviet foreign policy.

On the first one, I spent weeks and weeks working up an essay demonstrating that the differences were not economic at all but essentially psychological. For the second one I took some amphetamine and spent an afternoon listing all the countries that had ever bordered on Russia, how often these countries had been invaded by the Russians and demonstrating that the rate was identical pre- and post-1917.

For the first essay I got nineteen per cent and when I appealed against the mark, the Professor told me "I think the markers have been very charitable". For the other I got the highest mark in departmental history (so the geezer said).

Needless to say I didn't make it onto the second year.
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Stuart



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Last year I was confronted by an overbearing, undereducated, unreasonable boss regarding my lack of workload. Sitting at my desk doing nothing was fun - for about a week. Being the underpaid and so often underutilised person that I am meant that I had a lot to grumble about.

A large part of my job is testing shoddy software for bugs and making sure that the developer gets the earbashing that he so rightly deserves. This prompted me to ask for my employers to send me on a 'Software Testing' course that would certify me as a (you guessed it) software tester.

We had a discussion and he decided that sending me to university in the evenings would be more challenging for me, and somewhat pleasing for him as it would mean that my spare time outside of work would shrink in volume.

I have two three hour sessions at uni each week. Each session is split up by a twenty minute tea break. That's not much time to fill my bowl with porridge (it's a brain analogy - purely there for Mick's amusement.)

Most sessions involve a 'teacher' standing at the front of the class reading word for word a Powerpoint presentation that someone else has prepared. Reading as fast as they can they plough their way through to the tea break leaving the students that are new to the subject thinking that they'd just attended a lecture in Klingon. Dumbfounded they drink their tea.

Sessions that are equally as impressive are the ones that present us with a 'teacher' that spends the majority of the session regaling exploits so far removed from the study subject that we often wonder if they had attended the wrong class. Often nearing the end of the session they'd speed read the presentation and inform us that it's 'all in the notes'.

Even in the face of these downsides, I too had my appetite for knowledge moistened. I've started spending large portions of my day researching to better my understanding of SQL, programming, etc.
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Mick Harper
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Welcome to Stuart, one of our few members who has a head made of oatmeal and a body made of titanium.

One of the interesting things that came out of his post is the matter of "engaging the students' interest". To me, that is the one and only purpose of universities (and of education generally). Yet it is the one and only thing that (certainly British) universities do not require of their teaching staffs.

Indeed, at the "better" universities, it is positively frowned upon if you are a popular lecturer, inviting sneers of "journalism", "playing to the gallery" and other accusations of not being firmly ensconced in the ivory tower.

At the "worse" universities (the ex-Polys and so forth) there is an even more invidious policy. So terrified are they of accusations of "dumbing down" that they make their courses of quite incredible technical difficulty. I shall always remember an eighteen-year-old protegee of mine coming to see me for "help with a French Revolution essay for my General Arts Introduction 101 course". She was being asked to comment on two French schools of historiographers, sociological vs narrative, and their subsequent effect on the development of French twentieth century thought. Her first question was , "Mick, the French Revolution...was that the one with the guillotine?"
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Mick Harper
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Stuart illustrates another vital point--that universities are positively harmful to intellectual endeavour, not just bone useless.

Consider: your first year at university represents the first moment in your life when you are actually studying something you actually, freely chose to study. It's pretty near your absolute favourite damn subject. And what difference did it make? Why, by the end of the first term, it's just the same hard slog you had to go through at school. By the end of three years, you just wanna get your degree and never think about it ever again. Not that you were allowed to think about it during the three years.

If the North Koreans tried brain-washing like this we'd nuke 'em. But no, the universal cry goes up "Hey, let's make sure fifty per cent of the age-group gets the treatment."
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Stuart



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Not that you were allowed to think about it during the three years


This is another very important point. Indoctrination is in my opinion usually the last course of action that you want to take. If we force our education unrelentlessly on those we teach, we'd still be living in fear that if we paddled off the beach area for too long, we'd fall off the end of the earth in a somewhat Monty Pythonesque moment.

Encouraging people to challenge what we 'know' is a necessity, not an option. That's why I took an interest in this group of 'questioners'.

Unfortunately it's up to us to keep our interest fresh. This does often mean taking breaks..if nothing else, just to reflect on what you've done so far - best done from a little distance.
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Mick Harper
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But wait! Is thinking what most people really want to do? Who wants to live in a country full of thinkers anyway? Even Israel's given up on that one.

I do not specially object to "crammers" for grading our poor hapless fellow-citizens. It really is useful divvying up the population into those who can demonstrate due diligence and are therefore fit to be doctors and airline pilots from those who can't and therefore have to play football or stack shelves in Tesco.

But I object to the same pernicious system being inflicted on our own lofty selves.
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Ray



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But wait! Is thinking what most people really want to do? Who wants to live in a country full of thinkers anyway? Even Israel's given up on that one.


Aren't you confusing understanding with intellectualising? No one could want to live in a country filled with nothing but the chattering classes, but that's not the same thing as a country in which the majority have gained understanding through learning how to think.
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Mick Harper
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Aren't you confusing understanding with intellectualising?


Yes, and it's what I want enlightening about.
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Ray



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I'm talking about the difference between being able to tell one thing from another (perfectly simple, but most people find it extremely difficult) and wanting to debate about the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead.

I would say that the former precludes the latter.
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Mick Harper
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So you don't know either? Just as I thought.
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Ray



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It's not so much that I don't know; more that I don't know how to get it across to you.

I thought I'd explained it rather succinctly
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Mick Harper
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Nein, meine dicke Dame, du bist die bollocken spielen.

I'm talking about the difference between being able to tell one thing from another (perfectly simple, but most people find it extremely difficult)


These "most people" you refer to...do they include you, me, some of us some of the time, most of us quite a lot of the time...what? I only ask because every single human being of my acquaintance--even apparently four-month old babies--can tell one thing from another whenever it is "perfectly simple" but not when it isn't.

and wanting to debate about the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead.


Now I am always uncomfortable when people choose this particular example (which they do with unrelenting regularity.) Medieval intellectuals were as concerned as our own rubbishy intellectuals to debate problems to do with infinity and the uncountable and the incommensurable. And yet it is only the medievalists who get stick for it. Our own lot get given knighthoods and cushy jobs at universities and worldwide genuflections. 'Sfunny that.

I would say that the former precludes the latter.


Yes, dear. I expect so, dear. Goodnight, dear.
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