Delivering the feature address at the local launch of The Human Development Report 2013 on May 15, Prime Minister Freundel Stuart expressed a concern that students at all levels, but more alarmingly at the university level, were more obsessed with certification and titles than with a totally rounded education.
Noting that the distinction between schooling and education was becoming blurred, he is quoted as saying: “People go to school, whether it be at secondary level and nowadays more ominously at university level, but leave uneducated because of the obsessive preoccupation with getting a designation or certificate and not seeing the absorption of knowledge and internalization of information as a way to equip them to better understand their environment and to establish meaningful relationships with their fellow human beings.”
Just in case you might be thinking that this applies only to Barbados and the Caribbean, let me quote an article by Professor Geoffrey Alderman in the British newspaper The Guardian of April, 24, 2007. Alderman is a visiting research fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. He laments the same trend with which Mr Stuart is concerned. He wrote: “As UK students come to pay a greater proportion of the real cost of their tuition, they view themselves less as clients in the learning process and more as customers with needs to be satisfied. They are less interested in the acquisition of knowledge and the critical skills needed to evaluate it, and more interested merely in acquiring and regurgitating those segments of knowledge necessary to obtain a degree.”
He continues: “It is now commonplace for students to complain if they are expected to read more than the ‘recommended reading’ set out in the module syllabus, and some will even protest if they are asked to go into a library and read material of their own choosing, not included in the ‘course reader’ they expect each lecturer to provide. And if material not included in lectures appears in an examination question, their protests are likely to be louder still.”
The Guardian article is about falling university standards generally, of which student attitudes to intrinsic learning is only a part. It begins with the story of Paul Buckland who resigned his post as professor in environmental archaeology at Bournemouth University, when the university authorities awarded a pass to 13 students whom Buckland and a formal examination board had deemed to have “failed”. The reversal was due to the authorities’ endorsement of the view that the students should have been able to pass the course merely on the basis of the lecture notes, without doing the required reading. Say what?
Professor Alderman notes that “nothing could better illustrate the sorry level to which academic standards have fallen in many British universities in recent years. And it’s a problem that affects many parts of the sector, not just the post-1992 universities of which Bournemouth is one”. In 2006 Liverpool drastically reformed its grading system, as a result of which the number of students receiving first class honours jumped from seven per cent in 2005 to over 17 per cent two years later. The article concluded that “it is now possible for a Liverpool university student to be awarded first class honours without having actually achieved a first class mark in any individual component of their degrees”.
The professor’s contention is that in the UK most of the falling standards is occasioned by obsession with what he calls “the league tables culture”, where the more first and upper seconds a university awards, the higher its ranking. So each university looks at the grading criteria used by its league-table near rival and if they are found to be using more lenient grading schemes, the argument is put about that peer institutions must do the same.
It is one thing to be presented with falling academic standards, it may be a graver concern when graduates at any level fail to develop an intrinsic interest in knowledge acquisition or in the skill sets contained in a given discipline. This is particularly disturbing at a time when we are talking about continuing education and life-long learning. If the Prime Minister’s concern is valid, what we may be seeing is not life-long learning but continuous credentialism for work promotion and better jobs, with a diminishing qualitative output. With so much money being poured into tertiary schooling, often at the expense of other sectors, tighter quality controls must be put in place to guarantee cost-effectiveness.
We continue to look at education non-contextually. The development which concerns Prime Minister Stuart and Professor Alderman may be more a reflection of two facets of contemporary culture. Gladstone Holder used to quote Colm Brogan’s dictum that education, formal schooling, hardly ever rises much above the culture in which it functions. The current narrow obsession with marks, grades, certificates and degrees may reflect the utilitarian, materialist ethic in the wider culture which says that some extrinsic monetary or status gain must be derived from any pursuit. Sadly, art for art’s sake no longer applies.
The second factor may be the fact that the decline in the book and the rise of a visual culture, plus a muscular entertainment ethic, has seriously eroded intellectual vocation.
• Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and social commentator.
