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Salient: Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 28, No. 12. 1965.

Other Programmes

Other Programmes

There are numerous other smaller programmes. New ones come up each year, while others are dropped. The idea is to improve what works, weed out what doesn't, all the while looking for something new.

It could be the job of a select student council to set up programmes each year, recruit volunteers and place them, make sure both the volunteer and the agency are happy, and if they aren't, find out why not and do something about it. Students need more than campus politics and social functions. They should want to be involved in the "real world."

Living and getting to know Wellington City, students may also learn to know the society in which they will spend their lives, and apply these experiences to whereever they may live later. Whether they stay in Wellington or whether they go elsewhere, they are prepared, as they could be by no other experience, to respond to the challenges of an urban society with vigour, with poise, and with compassion.

I do not mean to imply that the university should abandon the idea that education consists of a series of papers to which a student must be exposed, but rather, that education should consist of a growing and changing blend of learning, understanding, and skill that an individual acquires and with which he combines the habit of advancing his own learning.

Perhaps it is time we asked ourselves the question of what we are here for—to offer a good education for people who are seriously intent upon receiving one, or to provide a pleasant stopping place for post-adolesence youth in a combination marriage market and coffee house socials.

Finally, I would like to ask, "What is the most important outcome of a university education?" Is it the ability to practise a vocation for which one has been trained, the capacity to demonstrate specific knowledge through taking a series of examinations, the decoration we call a degree, the friends one makes at university —or is it something more general, more elusive, and more personal than any of these?

Probably the most important outcome falls in this latter category and has something to do with the student's feeling about himself and his relationship to the world. It is perfectly possible for a person to spend three years in university, get all As, be elected to student associations, and even collect a spouse in the bargain, and still to avoid any experiences which make him a truly mature and truly educated person. Three years and a four-cornered cap with a tassel in the right position just does not add up to an education.

Education is sorely handicapped when it becomes a series of routines for faculty and students who have no genuine sense of community. We have all known intelligent, promising young people who, in the first or second year of university, pull out for something more real, more personal, and more related to the world. For outside these hallowed walls of university training resides the real world with many of its exceptions to the textbooks. Training means learning the rules; experience means learning the exceptions.