Quest for Quality - Page 2 of 2 |
If public money is at stake, the state arguably has a duty to control access, to ensure value for money. But most parents have to pay out anything up to £50,000, and more, for the privilege of sending their 2.4 children to university. Education is becoming just as much a commodity as the car.
Better Teachers?
Perhaps it is to enhance the quality of teaching. My tutors at university (admittedly long ago) had no teaching qualifications. Many, like the postgraduate students drafted in to plug the gaps, simply went through the motions. And the lecturers were a rum lot: the dynamo who walked and talked like a train, leaving everyone else behind, frantically scribbling; the distinguished if stone deaf professor who bellowed at us as if through a squeaky megaphone; the likely lad who thought a string of smutty jokes was the way to keep our attention.
And what makes a good teacher? One of my standard undergraduate texts was written by two distinguished academics: one dry, precise, almost punctilious in his manner; the other surrounded by chaos, a desk shoulder-high in paper and discarded cups. What would today’s inspectorate make of them, I wonder? Or Socrates, who only asked questions, or the Zen masters who never explain?
Better Learners?
I was not taught at university; I learnt. And teaching is not the same as learning; they can be incompatible. But education is still seen as being driven by teaching and not learning.
It is changing. Learner questionnaires are now a key ingredient in ODL QC assessment. ALI are developing questionnaires in their assessment of learning centres. Even OFSTED are piloting schemes to ask 11-16 year olds what they think of their teachers.
But making learner satisfaction the central goal of education is still deeply resisted. Education, someone said, is our only bastion against barbarism. So it is presumably too important to be left to learners.
David Morley
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