Higher Ed 101:That was then, and this is now.

by reestheskin on 15/03/2018

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“The relationship of the individual student to their university is an unusual one. In Western higher education, for a long period, the student was generally viewed by the university authorities and its academic staff as some kind of apprentice to the academic discipline: there to learn, certainly, but not quite in the way a high-school student would learn; rather, to play a supporting role in the knowledge production process and thereby to absorb an understanding of the discipline concerned. Several important features of traditional university life followed from this conception. One was that students were considered to be members of the university, albeit junior members, with certain rights and responsibilities. The role was neither that of an employee nor that of someone attending merely to master a new skill, as they might be at a technical college in further rather than higher education. Another important feature was that teaching methods, as a school teacher would understand them, were considered less necessary for a university academic to grasp than a deep knowledge of the discipline and a research orientation towards it—with a desire to extend knowledge in that area. Students would, it was tacitly assumed, learn by exposure to this atmosphere of scholarship and research at least as much as by formal, structured teaching. It therefore also followed that students were expected to take a great deal of personal responsibility for their learning, with teaching contact hours (lectures, seminars, tutorials) comprising a small proportion of their time—though students in science and technology subjects usually needed to spend a good deal of time in the laboratory. (Medicine was always different, as students spent a large part of their time in hospitals and usually formed a distinctive community where professional norms typically took precedence over academic ones.)”

“Universities and Colleges: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)” by David Palfreyman, Paul Temple