John: What do you think of the notion of Higher Education?
Sally: What do I think it means?
John: Yeah, as distinct from other kinds of education.
Sally: Well, in the first place, what is education?
John: I should think it's about having, giving or receiving knowledge.
Sally: And knowledge is about knowing true facts?
John: And there is no such thing as a false fact, right?
Sally: No, we should rightly call such a thing an inaccurate opinion.
John: Agreed - so knowledge has to do with facts - accurate opinions - corresponding to things as they actually are.
Sally: Yes, if you were to believe that lead is denser than water for example, that would be knowledge.
John: Because it's true.
Sally: And the statement 'lead is less dense than water' would be wrong.
John: And if I believed that, I would be wrong.
Sally: Well to be perfectly accurate John [smiles], a person can't be wrong. It
isn't as if there are two sorts of people walking about - wrong people and right
people.
John: No.
Sally: Rightness and wrongness are properties of statements or beliefs, to do with
their accuracy - how well they model the object or situation they relate to.
John: Quite. So a man is educated in proportion to how much truth he knows.
Sally: That is the way I would use the words truth, rightness, fact, knowledge and
education.
John: And the same would go for all the other species?
Sally: Yes. On this or any other planet anywhere in the universe.
John: So if a bird knew more about good nesting places than other birds, he would be
more educated than them in that respect.
Sally: Yes.
John: And if he had a greater knowledge of more things than others, we should say he
was more educated generally.
Sally: Yes.
John: The normal situation with humans is that different people have different
amounts of knowledge in different things.
Sally: I know.
John: Suppose one man had a great deal of knowledge about the life of St. Matthew and
another the same amount of knowledge about car mechanics, and they both had a similar
degree of knowledge about everything else. Who would you say was more educated?
Sally: I'd say they were equal. But I can see what you're getting at. The mechanic's
knowledge and the exercise of that knowledge would certainly appear to be more useful
to more people than that of the St. Matthew guy, but the latter would be held by many
to be the more educated.
John: Even though the mechanic's knowledge needs constantly to be updated and the
historian's consists essentially of the simple collation of already-existing
opinions.
Sally: Yes - if the car doesn't go we don't say the mechanic has a different slant on
things or has come up with new insights into the very nature of the motor car engine.
John: Or a fresh interpretation of the whole notion of vehicular perambulation.
Sally: No, it wouldn't do either for him to give a comprehensive and well-referenced
review of the various opinions people had about what was wrong with the car, no
matter how thoroughly he placed each view in its historical context. [Both laugh]
John: So can we return to the original question? What constitues 'higher' education?
Sally: Well I think we've kind of intimated one aspect of it - that of old-fashioned
elitism - let's not spend any more time on that.
John: Except to theorize that to some minds - the conservative old-school
ruling-class traditionalists perhaps - and later the emergent shopkeeper and merchant
middle class with their Eton and Harrow public schools - warmed to the pursuit of
already-existing knowledge - because it was easier - and because they feared change.
Sally: And liked to ape what they saw as their superiors.
John: Let's turn now to other, perhaps more cogent views on what constitues higher
education.
Sally: Yes - how can one piece of knowledge be justified as higher than another?
John: Let's look at it in terms of development - how one piece of knowledge builds on
and depends on a prior piece. In the early years of education, children learn about
whole numbers and counting. Then they learn to add them. The notion of length
follows. Next comes subtraction and following on from that the necessity for zero and
negative numbers. Then comes multiplication and the related ideas of area and volume,
rectangles, squares, cubes and cuboids. Next comes division, which necessitates the
notion of fractions and their representation as decimals. Then comes square roots.
When squares and circles are studied, the concept of irrational numbers becomes
necessary. All of this is motivated by the need to measure things in the world of
practical experience - traditionally the province of the lower classes incidentally.
Sally: Do keep to the point - ya bloody Marxist ya.
John: I could go on to show how the focus on rates of change - motivated largely by
the needs of machinery building in the Industrial Revolution - led to the development
of differential and subsequently integral calculus - which found uses in many other
areas of modern endeavour.
Sally: Let's see if I've got you right. Since each development in mathematics depends
and builds on previous mathematical knowledge, the latter concepts could be said to
be 'higher' than the former.
John: Yes, not necessarily more profound or more difficult. But since each concept is
a development of previous ones, that is the way it has to be taught, and as the pupil
'ascends' through his years in school, learning these concepts in sequence, it is
perhaps natural to think of calculus as 'higher' than arithmetic.
Sally: I'm glad you said 'not necessarily more profound or difficult'. I should think
that the difficulty comes only when the link to previous knowledge is not
established.
John: Hence the need for careful curriculum design.
Sally: And teachers with a broad knowledge of the subject up to the level they teach.
John: Of course learning - knowledge acquisition - is not necessarily linear - it's
often more tree-like in nature.
Sally: Yes, that accounts for specialization at the higher levels.
John: Yeah, it's interesting how that knowledge tree develops. When I was a pupil and
student, I didn't study set theory until I went to University. I was surprised when I
did study it how simple it was - no calculus, no rates of change, not even fractions.
It was built on concepts much further down the tree - elements, sets, cardinality,
and ideas borrowed from logic such as negation, conjunction, disjunction etc.Sally: That's what makes knowledge a tree and not a straight line.John: Yes. Of course set theory is now taught in primary school, because it depends
on so few prior concepts. No less profound for that - it's absolutely crucial in
computer science.
Sally: As is logic.
John: Yes - and these days computer scientists, mathematicians and electronics
engineers are far better logicians than the philosophers, who are still trying to
prove the existence of the non-existent with it.
Sally: Or the non-existence of the existent.
John: Talking of the non-existent, both glasses are empty.
Sally: Yeah both of mine are empty too. I think you will find it's your round dear
boy. Same again please.
[John gets the drinks in. Sally stares out the window, her mind on higher things.]
John and Sally Start the New Academic Year
John and Sally are two part-time assistant lecturers in a provincial third-level college of fairly high education in the West of Siberia. They share a desk and a computer in a camel tent at the back of the Administration complex. It’s the start of term and we hear them now ‘up the hill’ - venting - over a glass or two of Guinnevar and Lime.
John: Well it’s our first week back Sal, and in keeping with tradition I suppose we’ll be expected to come up with some sort of uninformed and provocatively barb-ed outpourings.
Sally: Yes, I always think that’s nice. I think we usually call it satire.
John: Nobody else does.
Sally: [shuffles feet] Can’t think of anything.
John: You’ve had a good summer then.
Sally: it was a bit wet. Yeah - the highlight of it for me was Tubberkurski’s Old Fayre Day. The sight of donkeys swimming backwards down Vladimir Putin Street was something else.
John: Excited were they?
Sally: Swept away.
John: How’s the new office? I haven’t been in yet.
Sally: You mean the office accommodation. They’ve given us new tent-pegs - and a life raft.
John: HRM are very generous like that.
Sally: HRM - is that anything to do with the royal family?
John: I don’t think so. Human Resource Management. Used to be called Personnel I think.
Sally: It’s funny how things change their names isn’t it?
John: Yeah.
Sally: I’ve just been to a meeting of lecturing staff - a Program Review it was called - not to be confused with a Programmatic Review - which is something entirely different.
John: Of course.
Sally: Anyway, it turned out to be programmatic. We discussed how we could do new and exciting things - just like last year. It was in a different room I suppose.
John: Thrusting. Anyway, what were the new and exciting things, apart from teaching properly?
Sally: No, Teaching and Learning was 2006 - along with Learning Outcomes - whatever they were.
John: Anything to do with the student learning the subject?
Sally: That would have been considered a rather naive view. You had to say - up front - what proficiencies the student would be able to demonstrate, how they would demonstrate them, and how you would measure that demonstration. [frowns]
John: Oh I remember. I thought at the time a syllabus and an exam would do that. The syllabus told them what they had to study and the exam how well they’d studied it.
Sally: Very naïve.
John: Good enough for Newton and Einstein.
Sally: Einstein didn’t do terribly well at school though, did he?
John: Perhaps he wasn’t clear on his Learning Outcomes.
[Both laugh]
Sally: And Descartes eschewed book learning completely in his early days.
John: Is Descartes the man who said: “I think, therefore I am.”?
Sally: Yeah - and between you and me - I think he probably was.
[Pause]
John: I’ll get ‘em in. Same again Sal?
Sally: No, I think I’ll have a can of Burn. The caffeine will do me good.
[John gets the drinks]
John: They only had Relentless Inferno - hope that’s alright.
Sally: Super duper. [takes a swig] Yes! - Anyway, the Program Review. They called in this sociology chap to tell us about LLL.
John: LLL?
Sally: Lifelong Learning.
John: Lifelong learning - surely that’s what we all do anyway?
Sally: I think it means evening classes and correspondence courses.
John: Oh.
Sally: Apparently it’s all about sex.
John: I thought sex was 2007.
Sally: Pay attention. Both the Chair and the sociologist mentioned sex so it looks like it’s still pretty important. They said we had to make computing sexy.
John: They’re going to have to hire all new staff then.
Sally: Our computing courses had to have sex in them, they said.
John: I’m all for that, but I thought the students generally sorted out that side of things for themselves.
Sally: I spent seven years studying Computer Science and I can’t recall a single lecture on sex. So it’s a subject I know very little about.
John: Perhaps you weren’t clear on your learning outcomes.
Sally: No, the library never seemed to be open. Even when it was the long seats always seemed to be taken. Anyway in Lifelong Learning there’s a problem with retention apparently, as there is all round.
John: The students are forgetful?
Sally: They drift away. We lose them.
John: In my college we used to call that ‘natural wastage’. Rather cruel, I thought.
Sally: So it was rebranded - into its opposite - retention. The Chair suggested rigorous attendance-register-keeping by lecturers.
John: Presumably so you could be even more sure they weren’t there.
Sally: Anyway the sociologist suggested - given the economic downturn and all and the general situation and whatnot - perhaps we could get unemployed plasterers and bricklayers in - to fill in the gaps.
John: Sexy. Only a sociologist would be capable of thinking so far outside the box.
Sally: Where would we be without them? Do I think I could teach a bricklayer computing?
John: Do you think you could teach a sociologist computing?
[Sally spits a mouthful of Relentless Inferno all over John’s extra-casual-just-came-back-from-holidays-and-can’t-really-believe-I’m-here-but-anyway-this-is-how-cool-I-looked T-shirt.]
Sally: Or bricklaying.
[Sally cops the Guinnevar and Lime.]
Both: Good luck with the new term. See you up the hill.
John: Well it’s our first week back Sal, and in keeping with tradition I suppose we’ll be expected to come up with some sort of uninformed and provocatively barb-ed outpourings.
Sally: Yes, I always think that’s nice. I think we usually call it satire.
John: Nobody else does.
Sally: [shuffles feet] Can’t think of anything.
John: You’ve had a good summer then.
Sally: it was a bit wet. Yeah - the highlight of it for me was Tubberkurski’s Old Fayre Day. The sight of donkeys swimming backwards down Vladimir Putin Street was something else.
John: Excited were they?
Sally: Swept away.
John: How’s the new office? I haven’t been in yet.
Sally: You mean the office accommodation. They’ve given us new tent-pegs - and a life raft.
John: HRM are very generous like that.
Sally: HRM - is that anything to do with the royal family?
John: I don’t think so. Human Resource Management. Used to be called Personnel I think.
Sally: It’s funny how things change their names isn’t it?
John: Yeah.
Sally: I’ve just been to a meeting of lecturing staff - a Program Review it was called - not to be confused with a Programmatic Review - which is something entirely different.
John: Of course.
Sally: Anyway, it turned out to be programmatic. We discussed how we could do new and exciting things - just like last year. It was in a different room I suppose.
John: Thrusting. Anyway, what were the new and exciting things, apart from teaching properly?
Sally: No, Teaching and Learning was 2006 - along with Learning Outcomes - whatever they were.
John: Anything to do with the student learning the subject?
Sally: That would have been considered a rather naive view. You had to say - up front - what proficiencies the student would be able to demonstrate, how they would demonstrate them, and how you would measure that demonstration. [frowns]
John: Oh I remember. I thought at the time a syllabus and an exam would do that. The syllabus told them what they had to study and the exam how well they’d studied it.
Sally: Very naïve.
John: Good enough for Newton and Einstein.
Sally: Einstein didn’t do terribly well at school though, did he?
John: Perhaps he wasn’t clear on his Learning Outcomes.
[Both laugh]
Sally: And Descartes eschewed book learning completely in his early days.
John: Is Descartes the man who said: “I think, therefore I am.”?
Sally: Yeah - and between you and me - I think he probably was.
[Pause]
John: I’ll get ‘em in. Same again Sal?
Sally: No, I think I’ll have a can of Burn. The caffeine will do me good.
[John gets the drinks]
John: They only had Relentless Inferno - hope that’s alright.
Sally: Super duper. [takes a swig] Yes! - Anyway, the Program Review. They called in this sociology chap to tell us about LLL.
John: LLL?
Sally: Lifelong Learning.
John: Lifelong learning - surely that’s what we all do anyway?
Sally: I think it means evening classes and correspondence courses.
John: Oh.
Sally: Apparently it’s all about sex.
John: I thought sex was 2007.
Sally: Pay attention. Both the Chair and the sociologist mentioned sex so it looks like it’s still pretty important. They said we had to make computing sexy.
John: They’re going to have to hire all new staff then.
Sally: Our computing courses had to have sex in them, they said.
John: I’m all for that, but I thought the students generally sorted out that side of things for themselves.
Sally: I spent seven years studying Computer Science and I can’t recall a single lecture on sex. So it’s a subject I know very little about.
John: Perhaps you weren’t clear on your learning outcomes.
Sally: No, the library never seemed to be open. Even when it was the long seats always seemed to be taken. Anyway in Lifelong Learning there’s a problem with retention apparently, as there is all round.
John: The students are forgetful?
Sally: They drift away. We lose them.
John: In my college we used to call that ‘natural wastage’. Rather cruel, I thought.
Sally: So it was rebranded - into its opposite - retention. The Chair suggested rigorous attendance-register-keeping by lecturers.
John: Presumably so you could be even more sure they weren’t there.
Sally: Anyway the sociologist suggested - given the economic downturn and all and the general situation and whatnot - perhaps we could get unemployed plasterers and bricklayers in - to fill in the gaps.
John: Sexy. Only a sociologist would be capable of thinking so far outside the box.
Sally: Where would we be without them? Do I think I could teach a bricklayer computing?
John: Do you think you could teach a sociologist computing?
[Sally spits a mouthful of Relentless Inferno all over John’s extra-casual-just-came-back-from-holidays-and-can’t-really-believe-I’m-here-but-anyway-this-is-how-cool-I-looked T-shirt.]
Sally: Or bricklaying.
[Sally cops the Guinnevar and Lime.]
Both: Good luck with the new term. See you up the hill.
Dramatis Personae
John and Sally are two very nice long-term serial friends of the free-thinking persuasion who, by a process too improbable to contemplate, have found themselves at an Institute of Technology in Siberia, teaching - amongst other things - the art of counting other peoples' money, and the ethics of going on holiday. In his spare time, John is supervising a Ph.D. thesis on 'the feng shui of chocolate eating and post-feminist self-actualization'- and Sally an M.Sc. by anecdote and word of mouth, on 'the impact of burka wearing on the greenhouse effect'. For their sanity as much as anything, John and Sally like to go to the pub up the hill and philosophize - to clear the air - and attempt to re-establish contact with the significant.
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