(Peter Monkman, winner of this year's BP Portrait Award)
Commuting back and forth between Royston and Barrington allows me to find the time to get loads of cool reading done each day and of course if I am travelling all the way down to Southampton to see my friends, there is even more! So, reading the TES, the THE and my new book 'Why we teach' by Sonia Nieto this week(end), I came accross some interesting reading which I wanted to share with you.
In the Times Higher Education supplement, the topic this week was a comparison between UK and US Higher Education. Apparantly in the US, students have a lot more power when it comes to evaluating and as a result also firing staff. Of course uni is much more expensive, (in the UK the fee cap is at the moment on £3100 a year), and as a result they are comsumers and if they reject the 'product', their professors, they can easily be made redundant as a result. Although I am against the concept of individuals paying for their education (another whole topic of its own), of course I welcome to the idea of students having power over who teaches them! If a teacher is bad, he should improve or go; it's that easy! This level of power does not exist in the UK and on secondary school level, it can really only be observed in democratic schools. Apparantly in Bologna there was a university which was completely led by students- very exciting!
On the topic of uni fees, Nicholas Barr, professor of public economics at the London School of Economics has recently argued that universities should be able to charge higher and differents amounts of fees which I find absolutely horrendous. Yes, the quality of the education offered at different institutions may be different and may also impact on the graduates eventual earnings, but theoretically every student has the same chance to get into the 'better' unis which are already much wealthier than for example local colleges anyway. Poorer students will be priced out of prestigious courses because they can't afford them at the time and almost every student will need to repay a greater student dept- surely this is not the way forward!
It is already worse enough that subjects like Media and Film, the creative arts and sociology are treated as 'soft' options for college and uni students, but now New Zealand is thinking about rewarding uni students for taking up 'harder' subjects such as maths and science. This is a very difficult topic for me because as a film student, I would clearly argue that my media/film/engl lit/photography A-Levels were just as hard as the ones of my best friend who did Maths/ Further maths/ Physics. We both got 4 A's. However, I have to say that he had to work much harder for his uni course than I had to. Secondly, I am currently profiting from quite a big grant which the UK goverment is giving to all new language teachers so it would be hypocritical to write that 'rewards' for students taking up subjects the government classes as 'hard' are bad.
I also read about guns being allowed in US uni classrooms- as protection against students who want to shoot others. What the hell?? Is it not bad enough that hundered thousand of US secondary pupils are not going to school because they are afraid of bullies, do uni students now also have to stay at homes because they have to be afraid of guns???
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