Whackademia by Hill Richard;

Author:Hill, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New South Wales Press

Just tell me how to think

I want to emphasise again that, despite the above – no, make that in spite of the above – good, creative and rewarding teaching goes on across the university sector. I have often been amazed by the lengths to which university educators go to engage with their students and to make the educational experience an interesting and entertaining one. Yet at the same time there can be little doubt that the bureaucratic nature of modern university education has impacted significantly on the time and space that academics have to think about their teaching and to participate in an environment that is conducive to the best aspects of what, in the current vernacular is referred to as ‘enlightened engagement’. The rigidification of tertiary teaching is an outgrowth of market-based, rationalist ways of thinking about ‘service delivery’, yet it is also a practice that carries with it the dangers of one-dimensional instrumentalism that binds academics to unit guides and which obsesses about learning outcomes and graduate attributes. Equally important, a system that is reliant on market-driven and career-focused education, with its roots in the productivist demands of the globalised capitalist economy, generates content more suited to job-readiness than anything approaching intelligent civic engagement. This is perhaps one reason why, as noted by Jen Rosenberg in the Sydney Morning Herald, many students – especially those in science and maths – question the relevance of their university education to their lives and communities.

To confront this orthodoxy is to be labelled a deviant or heretic, a relic of elitist higher education in a pre-branded era. To teach creatively, with gusto and wonder, but outside the remit of a standardised unit information guide – and irrespective of vocational and other concerns – is to put oneself at risk, particularly if students complain that they have not received ‘value for money’ or were not taught everything advertised in the unit information guide. Heretics are no longer burnt at the stake, but they can be held to account through rituals like performance management reviews.

Concern over how and what students are taught in today’s universities has, however, come from some unexpected quarters, most recently from Professor Steven Schwartz, irrepressible about-to-retire vice chancellor of Macquarie University. Professor Schwartz has taken it upon himself to extol the virtues of ‘practical wisdom’ rather than the career-minded stuff that is currently imparted to job-hungry students. Professor Schwartz’s advocacy of practical wisdom attracted a lot of public attention, not least because he personally volunteered to teach such a course to third-year students about to graduate. He declared that ‘I don’t want to teach students what to think. I want to teach them how to think.’ He would teach wisdom relating to topical issues such as euthanasia, gay marriage and stem-cell cloning, and ‘whether a Muslim cultural centre should be constructed near the Twin Towers site’. ‘The purpose of the course’, he intoned, was not to ‘to finish the job of making our students wise, but to start it’.

In a

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