Universal Education and the University

The idea of a university is the logical outgrowth of the idea of the collegium. This is the idea that people should get together to engage in educational discourse, edifying each other and those who are in attendance but not otherwise engaged. A university is just a collegium with a larger ambit; or as formulated in the USA, a college with the 'will teach postgrad courses and grant postgrad degrees' role tacked on.

The graduates of such a collegium or university could then become professors, that is, people who had thrashed out their ideas, threshed out the chaff from their ideas, and trashed the bad ideas, so as to be able to profess something worth professing. The whole idea was to go through the process first and then go out into the world to make it a better place (or not).

This was why most universities of old grew up as relatively cloistered environments akin to monasteries. The word 'edifice' from Latin aedificium (what they called libraries, mostly) reflects that. Sadly, many modern buildings are edifices that do not edify (much as many sacrifices these days do not make sacred).

In the early days only people who valued education went into such institutions. This changed when education was seen as imparting economic value to graduates. Then getting the degree became more important to the majority of the world than actually going to a college or university. And, as with watches, clothing and the luxury versions of all such consumer goods, labels also became worth something.

However, there are many simple tests of educational quality. Some come with counter-tests.

For example, ask a student whether there is such a thing as absolute truth. If that student replies in the negative, then ask whether this negative is absolutely true. On the other hand, an educated mind can juggle n+1 contradictory ideas in n sections of the brain while working out how to verify and hold on to n-1 of them for further analysis.

A good institution will have made students who, formerly unable to survive a battery of these simple tests, can do so by the time they graduate. For students who could already survive such a battery, the institution will have made them able to design and deploy such tests themselves.

All this, of course, leads to a society where ideas are thrashed, threshed and trashed more accurately and usefully. Or in theory, that's what should happen. Universally.

Education and the Elite

Someone just told me, "The goal of education is not to create an elite, but to provide people with the knowledge necessary for them to then help improve society."

This is an excellent topic for an essay. It should be set for an exam question or something — just tack on the word, "Discuss."

I would say that most people would want to believe that the goal of education is not to create an elite. Some of those people might genuinely believe this to be true. As for the knowledge necessary for them to then help to improve society, that's moot — what -is- the knowledge necessary to help improve society?

Clearly, some knowledge (for example, that which helps us understand society, how it works and what makes people's lives better) is likely to be helpful. Of course, the Marxist-type philosopher would argue that universities think that whatever makes a society value a university-style education more is the kind of knowledge that should be propagated. That's partially true, as we shall see.

The thing is that we all know that humans come in a bell-curve for most things. When babies are born, they pretty quickly prove to be differentiable for genetic reasons along many dimensions of capability and potential. Some will be taller, some will be shorter, and little short of drastic re-engineering with chemicals and nasty interventions will change that.

It is the same with displayed intelligence — everyone has intelligence if they have a brain, but without cradle-to-grave (or at least, birth-to-early-adolescence) environmental optimisation, a bell curve is obtained long before the usual university-going age.

This means that those likely to benefit from going to high school (say the top 80% of any cohort, to be generous) will now certainly have diverged from those less likely. The most divergent will be able to benefit most from going to college, and then to higher education. Eventually, divergence will string out the bell-curve even more, and the 'high end' will have become an elite.

There are two interesting counter-arguments.

One is that people can do better without going to university. True. Those are outliers. They are even more of an elite, being able to treat the world as a university, than those who do go to university. If we set the criterion at 'could not have made it into any university or benefited from one, but did better than anybody who could', this elite becomes even more elite. I don't think you can find anyone like that.

One is that universities are like hospitals or parks. They are public goods, since they are supposed to make people better (more useful etc) members of society. So everyone should be allowed to enter universities. Well, that's like saying everyone should be allowed to enter hospitals and make use of hospital services whether they can benefit from hospital services or not. We instinctively differentiate between hospitals and parks because parks are cheaper to maintain per square foot, if you include things like power consumption, water, staffing, insurance and (oh yes) medical services. So we can indeed make universities like parks if we make them less staffed, less powered, less service-providing.

So yes, I think that education has the largely unintended (but sometimes fully intended) goal of creating an elite. It's just that most of the educated have been educated not to think of it that way. Which is... odd.

Sabbatical

Every seventh year, a year of rest and regeneration. Speaking to academicians I know, this is no longer true. They don't give professors sabbaticals anymore. Time was, elite universities were the only ones that could afford the moral and intellectual high ground of such provision; time is, all universities have begun to think that it isn't worth it. World-class has become no-class; contract has slipped into indenture, and thence to slavery.

I am blessed because I was given an unexpected sabbatical, fourteen years into my career. And I've used it well, I think. I will always be thankful to those who gave it to me, for the gift that they gave me.

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Note: This is the 2500th surviving post of the Findings blog. Happy postday to us!

On Hold (Part I)

I realised some time ago that I put a large chunk of my life in limbo when I decided to go for the posthuman division. In 2004 I aced the examinations for that, and then began the long slog for the dissertation.

Some people are fast dissertation-writers; I'm not. It runs in the family. Or perhaps, one might say it overruns. I know a man who got his staff to gather the data for him and was very proud about the subsequent achievement; I'm not like that, and neither is my family.

It's almost there though. In a sense, it began to kick off when I became an historian in 2005. Then my academic mentor made me write two chapters in a 2007 book which, to my delight, turned out rather well. 2008 brought more work; 2009 even more. This year, I think I'll see another two book chapters, in two different books.

I still want to continue being a teacher. I think that if you were to read what I've written, you'd feel a sense of the didactic narrative there. I write to teach, to inform, to dig up the hidden underbelly of history and count the wriggly things.

This is why I sometimes feel like Elijah Snow, an archaeologist of the impossible, a person out of time, often being lied to, sometimes unknowingly conscripted into other people's games, once in a while heartsick, fundamentally optimistic though not without a large dose of sardonic cynicism (yes, that's a rare phrase that relates both dogs and sardines).

But as I've said before, "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be..." as Eliot puts it so well in the one section of Prufrock that speaks most to me. And in a while, when all this is done, my life will resume with a new vigour.

Synthesis

Today one of my professional colleagues paid me the compliment of saying that I was a 'real pro at synthesizing'. Coming from this person, I took it in the spirit intended; that is to say, 'a professional at reconciling multiple viewpoints and presenting them as a seamless tapestry'.

Yes, at the very least, I have become an essayist with historical tendencies. That's not so bad. I stand in good company with many who I would otherwise not qualify to stand with by virtue of quality. But like Newton, I suppose I can say that if I have seen further, it has been by standing on the shoulders of giants.

I've had two of my papers enter the final pre-publication phase in one week. I've come to realise that if I string all the beads together in the right way, I will be able to make the big deadline soon. The problem is that there are so many beads.

Well, maybe I'll be able to put them together like the facets of an insect's eye and produce, miraculously, some sort of coherent vision. When that happens, I shall have won this war. I shall feel most Maccabaean.

Atlantean Standards (Part II)

In the mighty shadow of legendary Atlantis is a tiny residue named the City of Lions, Sñgapur in the tongue of the Ancients. Today, I sat in Sñgapur along the concrete orchard with Gnomus and we meditated on the perversity of local standards. The once-colonial residents of the residue still have it in their cash-besotted heads that an overseas education at an institute with a Greater Name is always going to be superior.

Sadly, that is a myth in all kinds of cases except perhaps three. The local universities (actually, there are now four of them) are more than adequate for a serviceable education that is of relevance to the region. The only reasons you might profitably 'go overseas' are a) because the life in the metropolis of your destination is significantly more interesting and you will therefore learn more of the kinds of things which interest you and are actually nothing to do with what you are studying; b) because the quality of intellectual stimulation from unusual people and professors is very high, and it actually trickles down (as is not always the case) to the undergraduate population; and c) because you intend to live and work and have your being there, so you are actually halfway through the export process and will only come back (I'm not saying 'come home', note) as an expatriate of your new country.

Even sadder, there is one major reason why people want to 'go overseas', and it has nothing to do with education. In Sñgapur, there is a sizeable proportion of wealthy people who have had the accumulation and/or retention of wealth as one of their main existential pillars. The problem is that if you choose this as an existential pillar, it makes you feel more secure when that pillar is showing. It is hard to live for it (or with it as a given) and not defend its display (or display it as a defence of your existence).

That means, as Gnomus and I have found out to mixed sensations of hilarity and sober melancholy, that people spend money for ostentation's sake. If your education takes place somewhere which requires you to spend 200,000 local thalers, it is far more demonstrative of status than if it takes place here and costs you a tenth of that. Education is one of the few ways that a person can spend ostentatiously and still feel good about it, as well as defend the practice in any of the social circles that 'matter'. (Oddly, giving the same amount — for example, the 180,000 thalers saved — to charity feels wrong to most people here.)

But defences of practice are very strongly and quickly erected. Talk to any of the young people who are victims of this particular ostentation, and they will say, "Overseas education is good for you. You will be less narrow-minded and you will become a more effective human being, able to appreciate more things and understand more about life!"

Bollocks, really. Take a moment to reflect on the logical and empirical reality.

If overseas education (in general principle) is good for you, then the people at your destination should come down to the various states in this region for their education. If they don't, then they are narrow-minded. Hence you will be surrounded by narrow-minded people. Of course, if they all come here, and your friends all go there, then you will be surrounded by the same people that you have been with all along, which is hardly a recipe for learning something new about people.

More to the point, if you believe that people educated in local universities are narrow-minded, then this blog must be written by a singularly narrow-minded person who hangs out with other narrow-minded people (like the Policeman and my own Lady) who have all been educated here. I would love to see a student walk up to Gnomus and accuse him of having too narrow an education. And I would genuinely be glad if a student, after reading every post in this blog, came up to me and said, "Findings-writer, I think your education is narrower than mine." I would learn something new, then.

Why then are people in Sñgapur seen as narrow-minded? Is the writer of this blog an exceptional case?

Let me try to answer these questions in the context of higher education.

In general (and I must stress, IN GENERAL), Sñgapurians are very focussed individuals who don't realise that even when we are being (or trying to be) avant-garde, artistic, creative, iconoclastic (etc, etc), we are still chained by their colonial past and our mercantile ancestry.

When it comes to education, the former makes us tend to rank other cultures tacitly in this order: 1) Western because of the Enlightenment, with Anglo-Americans first because they speak English, the colonial Master-Tongue, and with special dispensations for other Europeans in various areas of snob appeal; 2) Asian because all major civilisations and religions spring from the zone between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Pacific Ocean; 3) others because they are 'other than'. Some will dispute this, but it's quite clear from university choices that we are overwhelmingly Anglophone in higher education because of our common colonial legacy of language. Most often, people here are just bored and want something new. Anything will do.

The latter, our mercantile ancestry and related familial culture makes us tend to evaluate everything in terms of economic factors — the consequent mental ranking does not normally conflict with the other ranking. This is why Sñgapurians are often narrow-minded. A lot of us can't escape our chains. Especially if we are chained by economics (such as government bonds, personal wealth and the need to display it, and the idea of financial value).

Am I an exceptional case? Actually, we are all exceptional cases if we choose to be. It only takes a bit of effort to stop living life as if analysis consists of polling your relatives and friends and favourite websites, and start thinking about who you really are and what you intend to do with your life.

In this post, I have only outlined a general situation. It is not true that all Sñgapurians are like this, or that those who go overseas have no legitimate reason for doing so. Some have very good reasons for doing so; some of them have excellent reasons without even knowing what these might be. Some will gain a lot from an overseas education, even if you exclude the bonuses that a Greater Name education can bring because of the associated memetic payload. It is also true that Sñgapurians can be narrow-minded for many other reasons, sometimes to do with religion or mental capacity.

All that Gnomus and I want is for the students who we taught and who we still teach to be able to choose their course based on firm principles (whether materialist or spiritual or otherwise) and be honest about those principles. If you are bored with being a resident in a residue, say so. If you want the status associated with a Greater Name, say so. That's the least that anyone can ask of you.

University Rankings

Well, the 2010 Sunday Times University Rankings came out about a month ago, thematically a sort of update on the Times Higher Education figures here. This of course will make people with academic desires, predilections, or pretensions lust after places at renowned Cambridge, Oxford and the Ivy League schools.

Someone (well, many people, deprived of commentary) asked me what I thought of these rankings. Frankly, they are all what I call pseudo-quantitative exercises. Without looking at what the numbers measure, we already know that these are dubious exercises. Why?

Firstly, the numbers you see rely a lot on either qualitative inputs converted to numerical form (like the infamous and hugely popular Likert scales). In theory, a large enough collection of inputs should work to minimise error; in practice, we simply do not know if this is true, considering that the inputs are non-random. How random can the respondents to a survey on universities be?

Other forms of non-linear 'hashing' such as converting raw data to a normalised index have also been used. An example of this is to take the 'best' value and convert it to 100/100, and then pro-rate the other values accordingly. Slightly geeky example follows:

Supposing you have a Physics test, and the best student scores 25/100. We have a few ways to convert this to 100/100: we can 1) multiply by 4, 2) take the square root and multiply by 20, 3) divide the score by 25, take the arcsine of that (in radians) and multiply by 200/π, and so on. A score of 10 on that test would get you 1) 40, 2) 63.3 or 3) 26.2 marks respectively.

Secondly, a lot of it depends on subjective data. By subjective data, I mean that the data originates from people who have no means of comparison with other institutions. For example, supposing I ask you to rank your experience in Institution A on a scale of 1-10. You give me an '8'. Four years later, you are at Institution B, which you now rank as '8' and you express the thought that perhaps you should have given Institution A a '6' instead because it is not half as good as B. Well, you are entitled to your opinion, but if it weren't half as good as B, perhaps you should have given it at most a '4'?

The 220,000 students surveyed in the Sunday Times version are like that; they are rating their degree of satisfaction without comparison, without objective measures, without reliability. Can we assume that the presumable error will cancel out? No...

Thirdly, many ranking systems rely on measuring awards. If we were to follow the silly example of this Professor of Economics, we'd be measuring universities in terms of Nobel Prizes. What's so bad about that? Well, the Nobel Prizes are one-off, first past the post awards. There are no prizes for second or third place, so we have no idea how close any given university came to getting one. It is like saying an MP is infinitely better than his defeated opponent even though he got 49.1% of the vote and his opponent got 48.7%. It is also like saying that all MPs are equal.

Fourthly, methodologies change from year to year and there's nothing that can be done about it. Ideally, they should improve; but in point of fact, the market that wants ranking data will require different measures each year, and hence require different methodologies in terms of data collection, weighting, cross-comparison and so on. Such a state has been passed off as 'good news', but I don't think that's necessarily true.

I could go on and on about how flawed everything is. But my readers are practical people, so what can we do about it? What I would say is that if you can live without brand names, most universities are fine.

A student should really be evaluating the environment in which that university is in, as well as what that student is going to university for. If university is a disguised career move, then you need a brand name. If university is a preparation for academic life, check out the research statistics and whether leading researchers are there. If university is an excuse to bum around, check out the social statistics. If university is a balance between personal finance and a reasonably sound education, check out the educational cost and its average returns (i.e. how much does a graduate in your chosen course of study earn within 1, 3, 5, or 10 years after graduating, ceteris paribus?)

There's lot's to say, really. I try to provide educational advice if anybody wants to ask, but here are my initial caveats.

1. Good advice requires good information, and to advise you, I'd need to know you intrusively well;
2. I come from an academic family, so I have a bias in certain directions;
3. I didn't graduate from a top 10 university, and never felt the need to have done so;
4. I believe that history and culture should have some weight;
5. I believe that a lot of students are attracted by the dream or ideal of a particular place, and not the hard data.

And, oh yes, I quite enjoyed living in Cambridge, but then again, I also enjoyed living in Columbia University. Your mileage might vary.

Waxing Philosophical

One of the questions everyone asks me these days is: "How is your PhD coming along?"

The thing about a PhD is that it doesn't 'come along'. It's a qualification, like any other, that says you know enough about a particular sub-area of knowledge to probably lecture anyone else about it. It says nothing about how much more competent or useful you might be. It does, however, imply that you have the 'iron backside' to work at something until it's done.

This has always been my problem. I don't have the 'iron backside' nor the 'brass spheres' to sit down and hammer at something until it's done. I need to get up and walk around, look at the problem from all angles, learn things about the things that are about the things that are about my topic, and so on.

I finished my PhD module exams about five years ago, getting an 'A' for each module. It's the dissertation, that 120,000 word monster, that is occupying about 60% of my resources! As many people will tell you, it's not the length, but the strength. I believe that when I'm done, the thesis will stand as a fairly strong and interesting one. It might even be useful. But it is agony to churn out five thousand words and then spend the next day rewriting four thousand of them.

Even at that rate, people might say, "Shouldn't your dissertation then take 120 days to write?" Heh. It doesn't quite work that way. As the length of the thing grows, its complexity also increases. In order for it to remain coherent, you need to check more things. And as you check more things, things get more complicated because of new input.

They say it should take you not more than 80 hours to do a 4000-word extended essay. That's about right. For 120,000 words you would probably need 2400 hours, with about 12 really solid productive hours a week. It will take about 200 weeks, or four years working full-time, to do a proper PhD unless you have it set up just right.

Unfortunately, not everyone gets it right from the beginning. Some of us start from scratch or from scanty foundations. This isn't always a bad thing, since you explore a lot of new ground. But it can be terrible when you find yourself out in the wasteland and wondering what on earth (or where on earth) you are, metaphorically speaking.

Right now, I sense I have reached critical mass. I have explored my tiny microcosmic space and I know it fairly well. I now need to write the travelogue, and I'm done. I will no longer have to make Atlantean digressions or summon forth spirits from the vasty deeps. But it's hard work. It's labour and toil and suffering and not a week passes when I don't think at least once, "Why am I doing this???!!!"

Subjects Cambridge Does Not Want You To Take (Part I): Soft Landings

What a tasty morsel for a person who is curious about the term 'areas of knowledge'!

Although this news article is almost venerable, being dated 7 Jan 2008, it is interesting to see that Cambridge University actually produced a list of 20 'A'-Level or IB subjects which it advised students not to take if they wanted to get in. The article says, quoting them: "Applying with two of these A-levels 'would not normally be considered to be acceptable.' "

What is this list of the sub-academic? Here, have a look.

Accounting
Art and Design
Business Studies
Communication Studies
Dance
Design and Technology
Drama and Theatre Studies
Film Studies
Health and Social Care
Home Economics
Information and Communication Technology
Leisure Studies
Media Studies
Music Technology
Performance Studies
Performing Arts
Photography
Physical Education
Sports Studies
Travel and Tourism

Interesting, isn't it? I wonder if any school actually tells its students about these things?

Reductio

I was reviewing my research documents today, in the company of the kind and systematic people at my research institution. That's when one of them, old in years and wise in experience, pointed out that given the documentation I had accumulated, it was quite obvious that some people were 'playing a game of soldiers'.

That's a kind way of putting it. The people I've been working with have been involved with the Ministry of Education at various levels of appraisal, evaluation, policy, and suchlike. They know what constitutes evidence and what doesn't. And they are alternately repulsed and amused by the kind of stuff that passes for legitimation and legitimacy at some educational institutions.

They were particularly entertained by my policy/personnel/programme graph, which charts on the same layout the movement of personnel, the implementation of policy, and the programmes carried out in ostensible support of such policies. One, an educator who is sometimes mistaken for a member of the intelligence services, went so far as to say that the alignment was significantly out of phase in some cases to make the anonymous institution look something like China during the Cultural Revolution, or Stalin's Russia.

Not being an historian myself, I pointed out that while such comparisons were useful as frameworks for comparison, I could hardly be expected to deploy the equivalent of the reductio ad Stalinum while trying to maintain an objective stance on the subject. The quasi-historian who had pointed the resemblances out then laughed and said, "Of course you shouldn't. That can wait till our book next year."

No, I am not one for the drama. I think that anyone who knows me well would be able to sift through every word I have written, whether credited to me or not, and realise that I am a writer of integrity. If the evidence is there, I'll say it. If the evidence is not, I will refrain. And I don't go out of my way to do hatchet jobs, despite the actions of others.

Examinee (Part VII)

The last examinations of my life so far were in 2004. They were both rather odd examinations.

The first was on advanced research methods and fieldwork. I found myself returning to the same café every week at the same times and sitting in the same places. I sat there and observed people and what they did until I had enough data to come up with a sort of anthropological hypothesis about café culture. Then I sat around some more until I was reasonably sure I was right. After a few months, I wrote up my research and submitted it.

The second was about principalship and school management. I attended this module with a bunch of soon-to-be and hoping-to-be principals, some staff officers, and some very interesting other people. For the final submission, we were given huge amounts of data about some fictitious school and asked to come up with a plan for solving all the problems in the school within the first few months of (hypothetically) taking office as principal.

This one was a bit difficult; towards the end of the course, I was bound for New York and I would have to submit my answers by email while settling in at Columbia. It was an odd time but a good time. I decided to ignore all the theory in terms of specifics and go for the odd solution of retraining a few personnel in different and unexpected areas, and then shuffling a few of the others around.

Months passed before I got my grades. I completely forgot about the whole thing and focussed on my research into blood substitutes. It wasn't until I got back that my supervisor contacted me with mixed news. After dealing with some difficulties of the kind that ensue when you're away and cannot protect yourself, I received a pleasant surprise. Straight As, and it was time to give up the taking of examinations for the rest of my life, and focus on my thesis-writing.

Examinee (Part VI)

It wasn't until 1996 that I faced my next round of examinations. These were held during humid nights in a campus surrounded by what was effectively swampland. If you didn't move enough, you'd be eaten by mosquitoes while writing your answers down.

I had six papers to sit for, and I took them over a period of about a year. Two of them were on quantitative and qualitative research methods; two were on science and language education; one was on human resource management and leadership; the last one was on current perspectives in educational research. I got into serious arguments with the lecturers in two of these, and eventually got Cs; I got A grades for the rest. Apart from my A in HRM during my university days, these were the first As I'd scored since 1985 in a major examination.

That was how bad a student I had been, I realised. But what had caused the turnaround? I think that it all boils down to this: at tertiary level, you express your ideas clearly in a complex field. If your answer is rational and the viewpoint you propound is reasonably sound based on the evidence you marshal, you will get an A. However, if you find that there is no evidence to work with, or if the perspective you are forced to swallow is too nebulous to defend or attack, your grade is at the mercy of the instructor.

All I can remember of the examinations themselves were that they involved 3-hour bouts of writing, some on an open-book basis, some not. You had to tear apart the case before you and answer it one way or the other or 'all ends up' at once. I remember staggering out into the damp night air, feeling absolutely exhausted. It was not a pleasant feeling.

Examinee (Part V)

"Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more!" Whenever I reach the fifth installment of something, I cannot help but recall the days of my youth, and my father reading Shakespeare's Henry V to me. The quote is, of course, taken from Act III, Scene I.

But yes, after a year of mucking around with 2-bromobenzyl bromide and silanes and phosphines and triosmium clusters and the fatal lure of x-ray crystallography, I went back into school to do my postgraduate qualifications in education.

I will never forget my early introduction to silliness in the educational world. At my entrance interview, the chairman and then-director of the Institute of Education asked me, "Are you trying to tell us that your father is Professor [name omitted]?"

I replied rather heatedly, "On the contrary, I have been trying hard to not bring up the topic of my heritage. It was not my choice to be born into such a family, and I think it is not right for you to keep trying to bring it up." I think I looked sufficiently disgusted that heads began nodding round the semi-circle and I was told, "Thank you, we are sure you will make a good teacher."

And so, I entered the admittedly comforting halls of what used to be the local university and had by then been converted to the sole institution of teacher development in the land. Examinations were interesting. They were held in a converted lecture theatre, where the heat prompted me to complete my examinations even more quickly than the cold of the previous experience.

It was in this milieu that I made friends among senior staff only to find that they were already friends of the family. I made friends with classmates who to this day continue to struggle on bravely and "close the wall up with our English dead". I was very fond of my classmates, and we went to each other's weddings and later in life got to attend courses together.

But examination technique became a very different animal at this level. I had no idea why I hated the textbooks so much, but I swore to build a philosophy of education by learning from what my tutors and lecturers taught and what they did which worked — rather than what they might have said which didn't seem to work on us who were their students. They were a mixed bunch, but they taught from their hearts and their deep experience. And when I sat down to examinations, I was pretty sure that textbook learning didn't come into it.

I was proven right. In the examinations we got, the papers required answers that were reasonable, sound and showed effort on the part of the student to make coherent sense out of a chaotic mess of theory. The psychologists warred with the sociologists, the anthropologists with the historians, the linguists with the biologists. The grades went to anyone who made a cake out of the grungy bits, and somehow along the way, I learnt the art of baking a good one.

The recipe was pretty straightforward. You wrote about existing theory. You showed how existing theories contradicted each other. You offered a better metaphor and pursued the metaphor to its logical conclusion. You designed a plan for executing the implied strategy resulting from that pursuit. You broke it down into steps, tactics, learning points. And you linked the whole package with careful welds and joints, making it as steady as possible while flexible enough to work.

It was a great game. But it was also deadly serious. I never lost sight of the fact that all that knowledge engineering had eventually to do something useful. I prayed hard that one day I would be of benefit to my students, and not let them down.

I had a bit of a shock on the day the results came out. My name wasn't there. Then someone said, "Hey, it's on that list over there." The list looked ominously brief. In fact, it looked like the list of people who for one reason or other had to retake papers in order to pass. Then I realised it was the Distinction Award list, and I crept away to a quiet corner to laugh.

Examinee (Part IV)

A curious gap in my academic career appears between high school and university life. This was because I enlisted in December 1985 and found myself, after basic training, in some walled-up compound where they taught us about information and how to disseminate, confuse, control and protect it. I took exams there too, and passed them all. At the end of it, I was tasked to look after a small cluster of information systems. And that is all you will learn about it here.

After that was done with, I went back to university life. The main problem was that examinations were deadly things, set at the whim of the lecturers, with a syllabus far more mutable and perverse than any previous examination I had endured before. A somewhat less than sterling performance ensued, with a constellation of Bs, Cs and Ds lighting up the night rather dimly. I digressed into astronomy (NOT astrology) and relearnt my OBAFGKMN main sequence (which is easily remembered by the rather dubious and amusing mnemonic "Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me Now!") which describes the fate of stars.

But of course, the fault is not in the stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

I learned a few interesting things in those years. One is that when proselytized on campus, you should pretend to be a Buddhist, not an atheist. It's safer. More importantly, one should stay calm during examinations and relax in the library. The fact that everyone is studying makes you either a) want to study more, or b) think of a morgue. Either way, the atmosphere is pleasant if you can stop imagining the stress other people are going through.

I also found that the kind of study habits that can get you through exams at the rate of a day or two per subject are just not good enough in the university. I was a terrible undergraduate, and several veiled ultimati were launched in my general direction. Each time I sat down in the bone-chillingly cold exam hall, I would remind myself, "This too shall pass, even if I don't. I had better pass though, else I shall develop arthritis before I am done."

Exam technique then devolved towards attending the last few lectures in every sequence just to figure out what the lecturer's pet topics were, then scrounging questions from your seniors (some of who were in themselves interesting distractions) about those topics. That got me a consistent B in pure chemistry. At which point I must digress and talk about the semi-fatal pull of one's convictions.

When sitting for English Literature examinations in my youth, I was firmly convinced that nothing good could come out of studying 'Africa' novels like Cry, The Beloved Country. The problem with novels of the Third World was that they were uniformly depressing and, while probably somewhat accurate in their descriptions of poverty and pain, seemed to have been chosen as a form of moral education. I therefore gravitated towards the poetry of Hopkins and Auden, and plays such as King Lear and Macbeth, since I figured I might as well have some entertainment with my moral education.

My Literature teacher told me, "You will not pass unless you study the novel, since 40% of the marks comes from two questions on the novel." Well, I got 55% in the preliminary exams, and then freed of the burden of having to follow the school syllabus, got myself an A1 in the finals. In neither case did I answer any questions to do with the novel(s).

This habit was only partly sustainable in my university life. I was not so hot on physical or analytical chemistry, but enjoyed inorganic chemistry and revelled in organic chemistry. I settled for a brief career in organometallic chemistry — at which point I realised that analytical technique, at the very least, was a useful thing to have. And so, it was back to studying hard enough to map it down on paper at the rate of 30 minutes per question. Fortunately, analytical chemistry was easy if you had been paying attention during practicals; while I was a terrible lecture attendee, I was a 100% practical worker.

And so I passed, passed on, passed out. I was now ready for... further examinations in faraway places.

Atomised Thought, or 'So, You Are An Undergraduate'

See them all go away, into rapidly specialising streams of thought, alone. They pour into the universities, where in theory all knowledge becomes one, and they pour out again, specialised. They graduate with degrees, each degree describing more what they are not supposed to know than what they do; so much for the holistic view of education.

For the students who have just completed the IB, or the A-levels, or any other high school diploma, the process has begun. It is a process that will divide soul from spirit and make new things look old and painful. Many ideals will fall by the wayside, to be replaced by better-defined, but not better-inspired, new ideals. Where once a man sought to share his life with others, he will graduate a socialist or a crypto-Marxist. Where once a woman sought to share her life with others, she will graduate an expert in jurisprudence or a master of trade negotiations.

Of course, it doesn't have to happen this way. But one should beware of the universities of this world, even while one takes advantage of their unique offerings. For a degree at any level is not a small accomplishment; even so, one should realise that it is not the 300-kg gorilla in the room. A degree is just that; one tiny arc in 360 for a circle, or even one part in 90 for the corner of a square. If you think education will fit you for the whole, think again – it is more likely to fit you for a hole.

Here are some of the poet Wordsworth's thoughts on the matter, from his eyrie in the cold corners of Cambridge (taken from his Prelude, Book III, lines 58-82 – full text here):

From my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The antechapel where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Of College labours, of the Lecturer's room
All studded round, as thick as chairs could stand,
With loyal students, faithful to their books,
Half-and-half idlers, hardy recusants,
And honest dunces—of important days,
Examinations, when the man was weighed
As in a balance! of excessive hopes,
Tremblings withal and commendable fears,
Small jealousies, and triumphs good or bad—
Let others that know more speak as they know.
Such glory was but little sought by me,
And little won. Yet from the first crude days
Of settling time in this untried abode,
I was disturbed at times by prudent thoughts,
Wishing to hope without a hope, some fears
About my future worldly maintenance,
And, more than all, a strangeness in the mind,
A feeling that I was not for that hour,
Nor for that place.

Yes, this is how the university student has always felt. Wordsworth was not so long ago; he lived from 1770 to 1850, and that period is but a drop in the bucket of recorded time. His fears, his thoughts and feelings about the post-graduation future, all these are the same as the thoughts the students of the present think.

Take heart, young men and women! Persevere and keep the faith, run the race and remain sure and steadfast. A billion others have trod upon the same paths that you tread, in spirit if not in exact substance. Some day, you too might measure yourself against the marble index and, like Newton, say, "If I have seen further than certain other men, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

Grad School

At least once a week now, I take the long road to the university at the end of this tiny world. It is often a Thursday morning; it is mostly a Friday morning. I go to meet my supervisor, to work with thought, to read and try to understand the ideas that others have had about education.

Occasionally, I am disappointed; the emperor has no clothes after all, when it comes to specific areas of education. Sometimes, I am enthralled; the emperor is fully clothed and flaunting it. This is more often the case with stuff coming out of the British Isles and some of its nearer neighbours in the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

Sometimes, the emperor is dressed as something else, or dressed with something else, beyond the grasp of my creativity. Perhaps it is an emperor penguin I'm looking at, or an emperor waltz; perhaps it is a gem of the empirical. I sit here and read, and am amazed by what I read. Sometimes, I am not sure these people aren't having me on.

When such a thing happens, when it all looks like it's gone pear-shaped in the reasoning or (worse) pie-shaped in the statistics, I retreat to the café, where at least some people are pretending to be human. I actually got an A once in a module on café analysis. I'm not kidding. It's one of those things you must be able to do, in the social sciences.

And here we are. So much to know, and no idea whether we ever will.

Subjects

I'm so sorry to those of you who have been reading this blog for sharp and witty writing (or whatever else you've been reading it for) and then been ambushed by a long series of autobiographical posts in which I get all sentimental and talk nonsense (as opposed to not getting sentimental and talking nonsense).

(That was a horrible sentence. I will go to some sententious, parenthetical and interminable hell, as my grammar used to say.)

My last post was about objects. This one is about subjects. I realised that after pontificating at length about education and suchlike matters, I haven't actually said much about my own ideal, perfect, beautiful education. Well, that's because I had a pretty normal education, and I might as well get it over with and disappoint you by talking about what i did for pre-university, undergraduate and postgraduate courses.

I started my pre-university education with a handful of mostly humanities 'O'-level distinctions. Somehow, things went awry and I ended up doing Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics and Mathematics as 'A'-level subjects for the first few months. Then I was summoned with a girl named Ee Lin (haha, wherever you are, if you're reading this, it was fun while it lasted) who was the only other person doing this combination and we were told to change it so that the time-table would work properly. And so I swapped the dismal science for the fundamental science. That meant I graduated in Physics instead of Economics.

Disaster followed disaster. Never a very good science student, I wound up doing Computer Science, Chemistry and Mathematics in the local university. This shrank to Pure and Applied Chemistry in my final year, followed by a research posting in organometallic chemistry. Oh yes, along the way I got an A for Human Resource Management. Haha.

A year later, I did my postgraduate diploma in secondary education. I got two Bs and an A for General Education and three As for Teaching (of Chemistry and Computer Science, and the Use of English). I got a B for the practicum (and an apology from my supervisor, believe it or not!) and ended up with a PGDE (Distinction). Another haha. Incredulous looks all around.

Then a few years of teaching in a convent followed. Odd posting that. Full post sometime else when I can bring myself to write more about those three years. Then it was time for a Master's degree (also in Education, what a fraud I am!) just for the fun of it. Further disaster, with incredulous laughter from my principal: I had Cs for 'Perspectives on Educational Developments' and 'Research and Issues in Science Education' – I don't think the examiners liked my views at all. The upside was that I had As for 'Qualitative Research', 'Research Methodology', 'Human Resource Management and Leadership', and 'Research and Issues in Language Education'. Especially for the last, I say, "Ha ha ha!"

Since that peculiar incident, I've not done very much. A few papers at conferences, a diploma in educational management, and the coursework for a PhD. Thesis incomplete. Story of my life.

The funny thing is that I've been talking about subjects, but it seems less subjective than a sort of nominally objective view of what my education is perceived as being. Well, I shan't subject you to more of this. I might say more in future, though.

Mind Over Matter

1989 was a very productive year for me. I was well on my way to an undistinguished first year in university, reading Chemistry, Computer Science and Mathematics. It was all very relaxing. And on 3 Aug 1989 I finally took up the challenge of a friend of mine: "Write a poem entitled Mind over Matter."

We were all bored then. These were the days of green-phosphor visual display units, and of playing all-text games, or games in which the sprites were animated keyboard characters. Our other form of entertainment was exploring the nascent internet and playing pranks - including the sending of funny poems to (and sometimes, the receiving of not-so-funny penalties from) the programmers and administrators at the Computer Centre.

Here was my effort (I have even included the header, should anyone want verification). Yes, it is a very bad pun. I'm still not sorry. And Sally, wherever you are, this one's for you!

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RSCSV22 SCE20010 XX/XX/XX 9:41:29 SST WAS THE ORIGIN
DEST:P08 FILE:5593 NAME:BBOARD LOG DIST:SCIENCE
RECS:1308 A0 VM/SP RELEASE 5.0 CMS PUT 8804+

There was a man who wove carpets:
Carpets of every shade and hue,
With a weave that was fine,
Showing shading and line,
And artwork too good to be true.

There was a carpet weaving man:
Carpets soft to the yearning touch,
Woven great in degree,
Woven when he was free -
They didn't cost really that much.

Carpets wove a man who was there.
Carpets were his life and his time;
You could look at your fate
If you dared contemplate
The silk as he wove it sublime.

Wove carpets a man who was there?
Carpets wove his life at the end:
Hand and eye did not fail,
But I tell a true tale -
And they drove him right round the bend.

A man who was carpets there wove -
Carpets himself three times or more
Each day. The buyers stare
As he dyes himself there
And wish he'd get up from the floor.