: : Your points are good, dont ask to be forgiven for ranting and complaining for a second, that's the path to empowerment it's rocky and a lot people would be happier if you quite bitching but it has to be done, damnit, we have to hammer it home that education is not the amauter theatrics of some self-important lecturer!!!:
: I agree too. I used to have to sit through a "Modern Rhetoric" in which the guy made this amazing discovery about Arisotalian logic--"syllogisms" and all that--and it pretty much was the same bit I learned in high school as "outlines" and "sub-headings."
All of you are quite correct that a huge number of fundamentally unqualified twits get jobs as lecturers. Here in the states, the big problem is that education is seriously undervalued, and as a result, schools are generally under-funded. This leads to the situation where instructors are paid starvation wages, so anyone with any real tallent does her/his best to get a job in industry, applying their tallents, rather than simply passing them on to others. As a result, the lower-quality instructors get jobs teaching, and teaching turns into, at best, info-tainment, and more often simple irrelevance. There are a few instructors who take this career path out of a sense of duty or a desire to actually see people learn, but they are the rare exceptions. Even the few decent instructors tend to get jaded, for three reasons.
1) because schools are underfunded, school boards try to hire administrators and other non-academics (e.g. coaches for sports teams) who can bring in money. In order to retain those administrators and coaches, etc. the board offers salaries equivalent to what upper-tier management people in industry and government recieve. Dedicated instructors who see these paper pushers earning what are, in the context of academia, outrageously huge salaries have a tendency to get discouraged.
2) In an effort to "streamline" education, many universities no longer hire tenure-track faculty (or at least do so very rarely) and instead focus on hiring non-tenure track, "temp" instructors. Spending a decade or more earning a degree and amassing professional qualifications (as well as massive debt from student loans), only to discover that you can't get a permanent position is also very disheartening.
3) Because of the low value placed on primary education, many undergraduates who are just starting their career at Uni come in with little or no qualifications. The minimal requirements for academic success (an ability to write, think logically, and do basic mathematics) are never offered to primary school children, and thus they reach the University believing that the sun orbits the earth, that Genesis 1 was intended by the authors to be interpreted as an accurate historical account of the origins of life, that the earth is a flat circle that is regularly visited by bug-eyed aliens, that the government is secretly conspiring with the cattle mutilators, that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, assassinated president John F. Kennedy, and other such nonsense. Having to teach people basic logic, when you had planned on trying to teach them African and Eurasian prehistory, is pretty disenchanting. Worse, being told that some guy in a red suit is going to torture you for all eternity because of the textbook you assigned is simply nauseating.
All of these factors play into what you're (quite justifyably) complaining about. Your critiques are valid, don't misunderstand me. Most instructors agree with you. The fault lies in the widespread cultural glorification of ignorance and disdain for knowledge, and especially for education. The question is what are we going to do about it? How can we make the general public value a quality education? SDF made some suggestions on this board a few months back, on how to reform the academy, and these were generally good ideas, IMHO, but I doubt that improving academia will change much of anything if we don't also change people's minds about the value of knowledge. Changing the way education works may be the first step in achieving this goal, but without public support, even that seems like a pipe dream. Any suggestions?
: I'm curious. What is the word?
MMMMMmmmmmmmba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-mmm-ba-mau mau, ba ba mm mau ma-mau, well don't you know about the bird? Well everybody knows that the bird is the word! (sorry, I couldn't stop myself... ;-)
-Floyd
None.
