Letter From a Wellington TC Student/Part-time Vic. Student

My attention was brought recently to a notice in the Evening Pott that Extramural Enrolments at Massey University are increasing by 13% this year, bringing the total roll to 4,000 students, Rolls at all other universities show only slight increases, most, a decrease in roll. While other Tertiary institutions show a substantial increase in Rolls and Training College applications have increased enormously in the last few years.

This to me, it a very heartening sign. At last there is a definite swing away from tertiary level courses that because of large class sizes are impersonal, that do not involve students in the Course of the lecture, let along in the planning of it, and that do not attempt to justify philosophically their very existence.

In many tertiary institute courses this is of course self-evident, ie. if you enrol for a car maintenance course it has obvious application and implicit student involvement. It is those courses (and I shall speak from experience here) like History, English and English Language whose Departments do not attempt to communicate to students what they see as their relevance, nor bother to find out what students feel to be their relevance (if there is any relevance at all which is highly debatable) which at present exist in a vacuum. I suspect other courses other than the above-mentioned are in the same category.

Students taking these courses are expected to passively subserve to some higher authority (exactly which one is usually disguised) which dictates the course content and course method of approach without consulting the consumers, to any degree, without even attempting to justify their courses themselves. The fact that the Departments don't, enables them to avoid questioning neither amongst themselves nor for there to be any real communication between the students and staff which I feel they are quite honestly frightened of.

Throughout my course of university study I have consistently and to my mind quite naturally attempted to appraise whatever work that I have done or am doing in the light of my beliefs and relate them somehow to those of our society. To give my study some meaning to me as a person. Perhaps this is why I consistently get Bs and Cs and why I suspect other people get Ds and Es, because, to the detriment of the academic qualities of the academic qualities of the work my own personal views and reasoning are expressed (it is often difficult to incorporate these into essay topics). Of course, what is even more insidious is that I have no comeback to make a statement like that except on my own conviction. The fact that students are not effectively involved in the evaluation system at university effectively castrates them.

Now at last a movement has begun which I hope will signal change in all universities. Those people applying for Training College especially in Wellington, know that they will be valued more for themselves as people than as academic regurgitators, that their criticisms are more likely to be acted on and that courses, because of the nature of a Training College, just have to be relevant to a certain degree. Courses are continually under review and subject to change not least from students' pressure who for the most part are able to actively participate and evaluate.

I wonder whether the drift of people to more practical applied sciences means that rather than study purely academic courses that assume such total arrogance and control over the individual they would rather retire from the struggle of trying to be persons in their own right and they hide in applied sciences. What it sadder are all those people who have lost the ability to be themselves and to determine the conditions of their existence who have been sucked in.

The extreme sadness is witnessed by the walls and cars of Porirua Hospital, the sadness of those who have lost (temporarily I believe), the ability to struggle.