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Description
WHAT MOST OF US remember about our days at school and university are the outstanding teachers (and the very bad ones). The iconic Mr Chips is the teacher we all wish we'd had. If the quality of our undergraduate educational experience is related to the quality of the teaching we received, what sense then can we make of a university's decision to eliminate all lectures in its medical school as from 2008? Specifically, it means the demise of medical education at the University of Queensland as we used to know it, and the rise of DIY medical training. Generally, it is a move that has become almost inevitable with the blossoming of the digital age and the domination of economic imperatives. What follows is not so much an obituary for medical education as a reflection on the significance of this particular announcement for university education in general, an announcement which represents a further devaluation of teaching.
Such a reflection must begin with a clarification of what is meant by use of the words university and education. In Australia the Dawkins experiment, commenced in 1989, effectively granted university status to institutions which had previously been training stations in marketable skills. We need such training stations, but what benefit is it to these places to be called universities? To ask this question suggests that there is some agreed notion of what does and does not constitute a university. The conflation of many post-secondary educational institutions into universities since 1989 has made answering these questions an explosive task. Sadly, there is little evidence that those who run our universities have any idea.
The Idea of a University is, of course, the title of John Henry Newman's book published in 1852, which contains a series of his lectures on the topic. It is not Newman's thought that I want to highlight, but those of Jaroslav Pelikan, the 2005 co-winner of the Kluge Prize (an international award that recognises individuals for their contribution in a range of disciplines not covered by the Nobel prizes). In 1992 Pelikan (at the time Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale... |
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