High value knowledge, and what to do with it

Around 830 AD the Benedictine monk and later Abbot Lupus Servatus, then living in Fulda, Germany, wrote the following in a letter to a close and learned friend: ‘Mihi satis apparent propter se ipsam appetenda sapientia.’ There are nuances in the original Latin, but the sentence has generally been translated as ‘It is quite apparent to me that knowledge should be sought for its own sake.’ Based in large part on this letter, Lupus has often been seen as the father of the humanist intellectual tradition, and the statement quoted above has been repeated and endorsed by many others, including Nietzsche and Albert Einstein. Many of those arguing for and defending a more traditional outlook on higher education repeat the formula.

In fact, the idea of ‘knowledge for its own sake’ has for many become the key test of higher education policy and strategy, suggesting a higher commitment to the integrity and independence of learning and scholarship; and often placed in opposition to a more impact-oriented or use-directed application of knowledge. But this affects not just higher education policy, but also the appropriateness and legitimacy of the strategic direction of some universities, and perhaps of certain academic disciplines or projects.

I confess that I don’t find this useful. For me, ‘knowledge for its own sake’ is a curiously empty formula, suggesting a metaphysical approach to knowledge that accords it importance without apparently knowing why. I believe strongly in the acquisition, discovery and dissemination of knowledge, but not for its own sake (which to me means nothing), but because knowledge empowers, civilises and innovates. The value of knowledge is in no way mysterious, it is compelling and clear. The case for learning is a much stronger one if its use can be explained clearly. ‘Knowledge for its own sake’ is no better as a pedagogical statement than ‘spinach for its own sake’ would be as a nutritional one.

What some who support a traditional outlook on higher education may not appreciate is that a formula such as this may have been persuasive when education and knowledge were largely the property of a social elite who had no need to justify what they were doing. Today’s society needs something more, and there is plenty to give. High value knowledge is at the root of social progress, inclusiveness, economic growth, better health, a higher quality of life. Universities need to be willing to associate themselves with such objectives and ideals, rather than arguing a much more opaque case based on a hoped for but not specifically targeted benefit flowing from detached learning and scholarship.

It may be time not just to modernise our higher education system, but also our understanding of why we do it.

Texting the course

Here’s a phenomenon I hope doesn’t catch on: I recently talked in an airport departure lounge with a student (studying at another university) who told me that his entire knowledge for the forthcoming exams came from mobile phone texts that his girlfriend, who was apparently a more conscientious attender of classes, had sent him summarising the syllabus. He had attended no lectures or tutorials. He had read no books. He had her texts. I hope, really hope, that he was pulling my leg, but I fear he wasn’t. He had, it seemed, the ultimate ‘textbook’, and he was quite confident that he could pass. I never even got to asking him how he had handled essays and assignments, that question occurred to me too late.

But the extreme nature of this particular study technique perhaps illustrates a broader issue. The conventional textbook sold for an outrageous price by a small band of publishers is, one hopes, on the way out. The internet in particular is undermining their business model, and we’ll be none the worse for that. In one interesting development, an American community college now runs a course that uses only open source material, and the students therefore do not need to buy anything. The college calculates that this saves each student $2,000 per annum.

For many lecturers the textbook was a comforting prop, providing them with course materials that needed no assembling. For students, such books were often profoundly anti-intellectual, suggesting to them (even where that was not the authors’ intention) that there is a ‘correct’ answer to every question, even highly theoretical ones. However, it is important that what replaces them is not just smartly digital, but is also part of a genuine introduction to real scholarship. I suspect that the post-textbook course materials handed out or made available on online learning platforms such as Blackboard or Moodle are often unimaginative and as prescriptive as the old textbooks – though of course there are also many examples of genuinely good practice.

New technology has freed the universities and colleges from the clutches of publishing cartels. But that must lead to something more profound than a narrow range of online materials; or your girlfriend’s mobile phone texts.

Higher education and the school dimension

The path that takes a young person to a university, or that diverts them from it, starts very early in life. It has been said that the best predictor of higher education success – far better than school examination results – is a person’s post code. The environment in which people experience life and educational formation from a very early age will often determine their level of educational ambition. By the time a young person has reached the age at which he or she might complete a university admissions form, their likelihood of doing so has long been decided. Universities seeking to extend access to disadvantaged students must begin with schools – preferably primary schools, or even with pre-school children.

This obvious fact has now been emphasised in England by the Office of Fair Access (OFFA), the body established to ensure universities charging higher tuition fees implement effective access strategies. In a guidance document issued earlier this month, OFFA Director Professor Les Ebdon said:

‘OFFA has long emphasised the important contribution that institutions can make in helping to raise aspirations and attainment among bright students in schools and communities where very few progress to higher education. However, my meetings with the sector to date suggest that there needs to be a further step-change in the efforts devoted to this area. So let there be no doubt – sustained, well-targeted outreach such as summer schools, masterclasses and mentoring can be very effective and we want to see more of it.’

In an accompanying press release, Professor Ebdon indicated that pupils as young as seven years old should be targeted by access strategies.

Leaving aside whether the English framework of student loan-funded tuition fees is a good idea, it is easy to agree with the OFFA Director that potential access students need to become familiar and comfortable with the idea of a university and the look and feel of a university campus from a very early age; as do their families, who often need to be persuaded that this is a good ambition for their children.

But this also reminds us that really effective access programmes are very expensive, if they are to be done well. I still hear university leaders claim that access students damage university results and performance – which mainly tells me that the university leaders in question have not understood how access programmes really work. As the statistics show, British universities are on the whole still quite bad at securing greater participation by disadvantaged groups. It is also possible that in Scotland too many think that free tuition is a support for access, which on the whole it is not. It is important that international best practice in this area is considered and taken on board; and right at the top of the list of desirable strategies must be a proper engagement with young people from the time (and from before the time) they first enter the education system.

The horrors of easy access to information

Nearly 45 years ago I submitted a school project at the end of the term. I thought I had done a pretty good job. On the whole the teacher marking it agreed, but he added the following qualification. ‘I really didn’t like your use of Encyclopaedia Britannica as source for some of your facts.’ I thought I had better see him and find out what was wrong. Had my use of the encyclopaedia corrupted the analysis in any way? Were the facts taken from it incorrect? No, none of that. He just didn’t like Encyclopaedia Britannica, largely because, as he put it, ‘using it is just too easy.’

Before you rush to judgment, remember I was 13 years old and not exactly producing an article for a refereed journal. So, as he told me he had deducted nearly 10 per cent from my marks for this use of sources, I felt I had suffered something of an injustice; not least because I had assembled other sources as well.

Fast forward to 2012, and for Encyclopaedia Britannica substitute Wikipedia; in fact, add the whole internet. There is now part of a whole generation of ageing  academics who on the whole seem to think that, with the internet, research has become too easy for students; or maybe, they have so much easy access to information that they are ‘distracted’ by it and do inadequate work as a result. That, as it happens, is what a survey of teachers conducted by the Pew Research Center found in the United States. I suspect the results would be similar over here.

Of course easy access to information is not always a straightforward benefit. But it is still a benefit. I am not a supporter of the view that information is too precious to be made openly available to the uninitiated, or that it should only be used with the accompanying analysis of someone older and wiser. Indeed, when the printing press first became popular very similar arguments were made then. The task for teachers is not to persuade themselves that all this information and data ‘distracts’ students, but to ensure that students are trained and guided in its use. But we should avoid giving the impression that knowledge is too valuable to be openly shared. That is not what the academy is about.

So how important are spelling and grammar?

Earlier this week I took part in a brief conversation between some secondary schoolteachers and academics. The question arose whether the claims sometimes made by employers that too many university graduates are bad at spelling and grammar are justified; and if they are, whether it actually matters. One of the teachers suggested that students leaving secondary education are much more literate and numerate these days than they were some ten or 20 years ago, but that in any case too much importance was being attached to this. I expressed the view that the quality of communication did at least to some extent depend on a person’s ability to master the basic rules of spelling and grammar.

Nearly ten years ago the Guardian carried a report that suggested that student spelling and grammar had reached a ‘crisis point’. Since then, the school curriculum in some countries has again placed more emphasis on these particular skills; so has the situation improved? And how much does this matter?

Digital ephemera?

Although we now clearly live in a digital age, we are often still very hesitant about accepting its robustness. In fact, though I am an enthusiastic user of every digital device and all electronic media, even I can be uncertain about their durability. A couple of years ago I was asked by a group of schoolchildren to advise them what format to use for electronic data they wanted to put in a time capsule, to be opened in 100 years. Paper, I said without hesitation. I could not be sure that a disk, or a memory stick, or a DVD would still be readable in 100 years time, or indeed that they would not have degraded in the interim.

So what does that mean? Should we assume that what we consume in digital format is for the moment only? This question has been raised on some occasions in relation to ebooks: is reading literature (or anything else) in this format the same as reading a paper-based book, or is it in some way different? The author Jonathan Franzen has recently suggested that the ‘impermanence’ of ebooks makes them unsuitable for serious reading. This becomes an issue in universities when the prospect arises of distributing course materials entirely in digital format, so-called ‘etexts’. Some argue in favour of using these, others are more cautious; but the early evidence is that they can be very effective educational tools.

Personally, I am willing to read pretty much anything in ebook format, though if I believe that I will want to read the book again and may want to reference it in future, I’ll buy a paper copy. But textbooks are different anyway. Most students dispose of them after they have completed their studies. There is therefore little reason to conclude that having etexts is somehow worse than having traditional books; indeed the use of etexts may provide lecturers with an opportunity to use innovative pedagogy.

I still do not know how the digital world will develop, and I am absolutely ready to believe that what we use now in electronic format will not be useable in 30 years time. But I do believe that the principle of electronic reading will continue to be adopted, and the technology will eventually produce more durable products; and I see no evidence of any pedagogical disadvantage. We must continue to innovate, even if the books on my bookshelves will remain also.

The progression of learning

Some weeks ago I was attending a workshop on secondary education, in the course of which I expressed my concerns that the learning methods encouraged and used in order to prepare students for final school examinations (‘A’ Levels, Leaving Certificate, Highers) were wholly at odds with the higher education approach to scholarship: that schools were teaching students to behave in ways that were pedagogically suspect and would harm them when at university. One of my complaints was that students were encouraged to adopt rote learning methods.

In the course of the same workshop during an open discussion session it became necessary, for reasons I won’t bother you with here, to multiply 7 by 9. As various hands reached for calculators or calculator apps on mobile phones, I expressed astonishment that everyone could not just say immediately from memory that the answer was 63. ‘Ah’, said one bright spark, ‘but you just told us that rote learning was bad.’ Well, I replied, I never suggested that it was unnecessary for people to learn and memorise certain key facts; it is just that as education progresses you need to move from basic knowledge accumulation to analysis and intellectual creativity. But if you know nothing, you won’t be much good at analysing anything. Now what we appear to have far too often is that the basic building blocks of knowledge are not implanted in young minds, while later in the education cycle far more arguable propositions are presented as ‘facts’ to be memorised for subsequent regurgitation in exams. And that is the wrong way round.

Far too often now I come across people educated in the period, say, between 1975 and 2000 who know very little or even nothing of what I would regard as elementary aspects of history, geography, mathematics or science; or whose knowledge of language is amazingly insecure. Often these people leave higher education and enter employment, where their employers then blame universities (mostly unfairly) for failing to educate them satisfactorily.

All of this has become a matter of discussion and dispute in the wider educational debate. In England the Schools Minister has recently suggested that there should be some return to rote learning to ensure that students acquire and retain basic mathematical skills in particular. In other contexts I am not, as I have expressed here before, a fan of the English government’s education policy, but here the Minister may be right. He has been criticised by the National Union of Teachers, but he should stand firm. It is time to re-establish a much better understanding of pedagogy and learning.

My colleague the computer

It’s that time of year when academics all over the place get ready for another avalanche of marking and assessment. In my own case, while I really do miss teaching very much and am looking at ways of returning to it, I don’t miss marking. Not even slightly. And I feel for those who will, over the next couple of months, be inundated with it.

But is there another way? In fact, could we just give the job to computers? And might we find that they can grade essays and assignments and examinations just as effectively as we can? Well perhaps, according to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Akron. They compared grades given to 22,000 short essays written in American schools by live examiners with those recorded by computers running ‘automated essay scoring software’. The differences were, according to the researchers, ‘minute’.

I don’t know what kind of software this is, or how it works, or what its stated limitations might be, but this is a pretty amazing result. We know that computers can easily grade multiple choice examinations, but essays? And can we really imagine that an assignment intended to produce reasoned analysis could be assessed by machine? More generally, how much work has been done in considering the role that computers can play in designing, conducting and assessing teaching?

In fact, this is a subject of some interest in the education world. In July of this year there will be a conference in Southampton in England on computer-assisted assessment, and indeed there is a journal on the subject.

There are probably various contexts in which higher education assessment can be conducted by or with the help of software. But equally there are others where, at least from my perspective, it is unlikely that computers will be able to make robust qualitative judgements that could replicate human marking. Somehow I doubt that, in a few years, lecturers will no longer have to be examiners.

Education all the way to the bank

Today I want to tell you about millionaires. More specifically, let us have a look at British millionaires, or rather, 436 of these. My interest in them was sparked by a recent survey conducted by investment advisers Skandia, the Millionaire Monitor+. This tells you all sorts of things about the people with lots of money, including something about their education. In fact, the Monitor+ gives us a whole new league table: the rankings for universities with millionaire graduates. Seriously.

So who is top of these very expensive pops? Actually, it’s the University of London – though that’s not really fair, because the University of London contains a number of autonomous ‘elite’ institutions which are all banded together in this table.  Second and third are Oxford and Cambridge. So far, so predictable. In fact, one newspaper report on this particular league table suggested that the list is dominated by Russell Group universities. That’s not really true, because alongside Oxbridge, and indeed Scotland’s St Andrews and Edinburgh, we also find Aston University (at number 10), the Open University (number 12), the new (post-1992) universities of Portsmouth and Brighton (at 15 and 16), and indeed Greenwich university (number 20). A few Russell Groupers don’t make an appearance at all.

And here’s another thing. A significant proportion of these higher educated millionaires went to private schools. Indeed, St Andrews scores highest on this aspect: a majority of its super rich graduates got to St Andrews via private education.

Does all this actually tell us anything at all? Or is it just that even the maddest criteria can serve for a league table? I would want to be careful with my conclusions, but it may be possible to argue that, on the one hand, inherited wealth seeks out universities with a reputation for receiving the social elite; but that when it comes to educating the successful entrepreneurs of tomorrow, these come from a much more diverse set of institutions. Once you exclude millionaires who had a private school education, Brighton University performs more or less as well as St Andrews in the millionaire graduate stakes. So if you don’t have lots of money but do have lots of ambition, most universities can help you equally well.

Modern languages in Irish primary schools

Guest post by Tanya Flanagan, National Coordinator, Modern Languages in Primary Schools Initiative

The recent Irish government budget announcements included a proposal to abolish the Modern Languages in Primary Schools Initiative with immediate effect. As one can appreciate, we are absolutely devastated by this announcement which comes at the end of a year when we have been congratulated at every review meeting with the Department of Education and Skills in terms of how we have continued to maintain and deliver excellent services while achieving significant efficiencies. We support modern languages in over 550 schools nationally with a core team of just 6 people. We provide training, resources and school-based support as well as funding 300 visiting teachers who deliver the programme in schools nationwide….all within a budget of under €2 million, and not the €2.5 million erroneously quoted in the budget documents.

In terms of policy, we are already years behind our commitments under the Barcelona Agreement and the Lisbon Strategy – these agreements called for systems to be in place to facilitate early language learning of at least two foreign languages by 2010. Even more incredibly, all EU countries, including Ireland, ratified recommendations in November 2011 in which we have pledged to ‘step up [our] efforts’ to implement the Barcelona Agreement! As recently as October the Royal Irish Academy published their National Languages Strategy which called for ‘the Modern Languages in Primary Schools Initiative (to)be integrated into the mainstream curriculum, as strongly recommended by the Expert Group on Future Skills Needs (2005) and the Council of Europe Policy Profile (2008) document, rather than being limited to extra-curricular time and to a portion of schools’. A Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation report also quoted in the RIA strategy states that the widespread but erroneous perception that ‘English is enough’ militates against the kind of plurilingual ambitions and achievements common in non-anglophone EU member states. The most recent strategy and action plan issued by the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Innovation argues that ‘the main challenge for Ireland…is to become a truly multilingual society, where the ability to learn and use two or more languages is taken for granted and fostered at every stage of the education system and through lifelong education’.

In such difficult economic times, how can this decision be justified? Over 14 years of expertise will be lost to the system and a whole generation of our children will be placed at an even greater disadvantage as they try to compete for jobs with our fellow Europeans. This decision will result in the only children accessing modern language classes being the privileged classes who can afford to pay for them – a return to the situation of 20 years ago. It will also result in over 300 more teachers on the live register.