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The Forum > Article Comments > Degrees of misunderstanding > Comments

Degrees of misunderstanding : Comments

By James Wilkinson, published 20/7/2006

Passing courses and getting a degree doesn’t guarantee a thing.

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Good Article,

you forgot to mention the social pressures put on students, but coming from Harvard i doubt there are many students with financial, social and family pressures.

Society has shaped us to have an answer to every question, and so we will.

Fundamentally, we dont have time to engage in critical thinking unless someone is paying us.

This does not stop critical thinking, merely it is done by the passionate of their own accord or with the stability to do so, not by the wider students down rung who do it because they have to.

Society wants achievers, and students have ambition in most cases that is the reason they are there in the first place.

It many not guarantee a thing, but it does guarantee opportunity if you have selected the right course with the right supply and demand.
Posted by Realist, Thursday, 20 July 2006 11:56:00 AM
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As the Professor reminded us, “one of the most significant extensions of our knowledge over the past 30 years is our understanding of how students learn.”

Unfortunately, within Australia at the present time there exists a shrill cadre of commentators, some of whom call themselves education “experts”, yet who remain willfully ignorant of the last 30 years of psychological research evidence about how we construct knowledge, and are determined to influence politicians and public opinion to return us to the days of stuffing heads full of soon-to-be-forgotten content.

Did you know that when former HSC students were quizzed on key facts from their exams only six weeks after sitting their HSC, most had forgotten more than 50% of the content? If we don’t equip kids with the skills and motivation to learn for themselves, then their years in school will be largely wasted. That is why the Professor is arguing for process over content.

I can honestly say that since graduating I have had no cause whatsoever to use the facts and dates I learnt about Ancient Athens during my final year of high school. Fortunately for me, what survived was an ongoing enthusiasm and thirst for researching information and attempting to distil knowledge from evidence. For this, I credit my ancient history teacher who encouraged us to debate the unsolved questions from the period (eg. who was to blame for the Peloponnesian war?) and even to watch the BBC’s production of that fictionalised history “I Claudius”.

But there are those who would happily sack my excellent ancient history teacher for being too “trendy” or “postmodern” or other such garbage terms, and replace her with a drone who wrote notes on the blackboard for us to copy. Had that occurred in my class, I would have failed the subject through boredom, and been left with nothing from the experience.

And I certainly wouldn’t have grown up to seek explanations and ask difficult questions of the people who are trying to ram their “facts” down my throat. No wonder they want to eradicate critical curricula from our schools.
Posted by Mercurius, Thursday, 20 July 2006 12:48:40 PM
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Prof Wilkinson evokes memories of my time at university as a mature age student. Our course was to do with the primary extractive industries, although we aspirants had grown up spoon-fed, in suburbia.

We found the concepts baffling and some of us dropped out (your scribe considered cutting-and-running).

In fact the sticking point which concealed the road to Damascus, was our natural reluctance to drop some of our most dearly held myths. When we re-created processes for ourselves in the lab, we discovered that the world was not QUITE the way we had always pictured it to be in our minds. A truly transformative moment.

Un-learning is the unacknowledged ingredient in the getting of wisdom. It is the sine qua non, the transmutation of the alchemist himself, the re-making of the student in whole. Newton's Principia is a masterpiece of un-learning.

Un-learning, the transformation of the student, has been amputated in the service of the myth that Time = Money, two metrics which have no real existence. It's insane, self-defeating and anti-intuitive.
Posted by Chris Shaw, Carisbrook 3464, Thursday, 20 July 2006 1:07:51 PM
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Poor students, always getting a hard time. They're only studying Astrophysics - it's not as if it's rocket science...

Actually, it's quite suprising that Astronomy students wouldn't know what causes the seasons. A quick look at the available courses (assuming that Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics relies on Harvards Astronomy Department for teaching) reveals that at least one course should have covered this at least in passing (http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/hco/astro/academics/courselist.html - No135 Planetary Systems Astronomy).

In order to point a telescope at the right part of the sky, an astronomer needs to understand declination and right assention as well as ecliptic planes and the axial tilt that brings about the seasons. For no other reason would an astronomer really need to what causes the seasons. It seems like the students were taught how to point the telescope without understanding why closer objects on the ecliptic plane traversed the sky differently to distant stars. How rather than why.

One would have hoped that Harvard would have lifted its game in the intervening 25 years.
Posted by Narcissist, Thursday, 20 July 2006 4:36:44 PM
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I rather think the Professor is comparing apples with oranges in this piece.I don't think that basing a paper on the findings in an American university (albeit that the University concerned is regarded as one of that countries finest) empowers one to make a blanket assessment of university practices and undergraduates worldwide. I also take issue with his classification of "generalised" study courses. What on earth are "general" courses in any case? Is the Professor in fact reverting to the age-old argument between The Humanities and the Sciences?

I am doing post-grad studies in the Lit/Dram which means I have spent the last few years of my life studying the Humanities. And I do not agree at all with the picture the Professor paints of both students and their educators. As a "mature" (daft bloody title, that)student I came back to Uni with a different outlook on life to, say, a middle-class school leaver. We had different lessons both to learn and to unlearn. And we came out of the process with respect for other peoples experiences, ideas and viewpoints, as well as a thorough grounding in research methods. We were encouraged to question, to debate, to probe, to find answers and to realise exactly how little we had consumed of the vast areas of knowledge that exist.

Mate, if anyone had thrust a camera and mike in our faces at graduation and asked the same question we might not have come up with the right answer either, but by the gods, we would have had a bloody good time debating it!
Posted by Romany, Friday, 21 July 2006 8:02:29 PM
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Mmmmm,
A teaching and learning director at Harvard University does not realise a teacher is just a facilitator. They set up the environment so learners learn. That is about it.
Posted by GlenWriter, Sunday, 23 July 2006 2:16:22 PM
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