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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 25, No. 9. 1962.

Black Mark

Black Mark

It cannot and must not be implied that the sins are entirely on the side of the lecturers. This is a black mark on our education system as a whole. It is obvious that many students just aren't prepared for University teaching, nor for the intelligent use of their minds.

A lecturer does not dare risk being controversial when he knows that his words are being taken down holus-bolus by the benches of mindless jotters with which he is now faced. And of course it is pretty difficult to be amusing or original about ketones or conics.

But putting all that aside, there is no excuse for lectures which deal with intrinsically interesting subjects and are delivered by well-qualified people to be dull, dry and severely academic. It is no excuse to say that lecturers are primarily post-graduate students not qualified to teach.

If they cannot lecture, they should not be lecturing. And this leads to the obvious conclusion that far too much emphasis is being placed on lecturing as a method of communicating ideas. Especially so with ideas which are quite readily obtainable from textbooks.

Why assume automatically that this is the way it has to be? It is definitely not the way it is or ever has been in many overseas universities. Let's not swing to the other end of the scale and advocate the abolishment of lectures, because they are in their way, an intrinsic part of learning.

But why not restrict the amount of lecturing? And why not, assuming as has been suggested that most lecturers are primarily postgraduate students, let them lecture on some new line of thought in their specialties?

The public system forces the lecturer to make his lecture interesting and timely. He knows that he will be faced not only by undergraduates but also by his fellow-graduates. The recent lecture at Cambridge on Snow by Dr Leavis admirably illustrates this.