cyberspace junkyard

I'm being teached

It's Tuesday, which means that I leave work at 4pm to go to uni to do some work on my thesis. Do you know that it has been 19 years straight that I've been studying?

What is university anyway? Nowadays it has morphed into a muddled collection of faculties, full of modern day academics and boasting administrators that try to make it a profitable organisation that's in the black at the end of the day. So how do you reconcile the concept of higher learning with turning over a profit? Does it mean that you open your doors to teaching skills and professions that can be taken into the working world as opposed to generating original thought amongst the students and thereby turning them into future academics? What is about those years of toil and slog, culminating in a piece of paper which could potentially determine the direction of the next 40 years of your life? I still find it baffling that I can spend a month researching a paper and pouring every ounce of original thought and objective opinions that I have into it, and still get the same mark as when I stay up the night before, writing (in my opinion) a shoddy paper that nonetheless is exactly what I know the tutor wants to read.

Are life's lessons really to be learnt at uni or is the grand tradition of institutions such as the Univesity of Sydney or the University of New South Wales, both of which I've attended, now just a finishing school that dictates you must have qualifications to make anything of yourself in life?

Cynicism aside - I have a supervisor this year who is a cut above the rest. She's tossed aside the idea of lectures and tutorials to run small group seminars where each of us are encouraged to present our thoughts on certain readings and concepts in an open forum to be discussed amongst 2-3 of our peers and elders. We learn by appreciation, by criticism and most of all by thinking for ourselves. A novel idea indeed.