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After the academics have learned to t-h-i-n-k, who's going to show them how to t-e-a-c-h?

Bruce: Why did you write your course evaluation?

Chris: Well, the main thing I was interested in was to try and describe the quality of the relationship between the students and myself, the teacher and also the quality of the relationships among students.

I've never had training as a teacher, I'm like 95% of the staff in the university. We don't have any training. Most of us come straight from graduate school and into jobs as teachers.

I've had no training as a teacher and I've been there 7 years and I wanted to write an account of my experience. I wanted to try and figure out the mystifications that occur in the university. Because it seems to me that a lot of what people say about what happens in higher education doesn't in fact happen.

There is a myth that says that there is academic freedom in the university. What happens in fact is a freedom for the teacher and not for the student. And when you get to describing what actually happens in the classroom as I've tried to describe in the course evaluation you get a better understanding of not the academic freedom but of academic control that teachers have over students. Its control of course content, control of what is learned, when learning takes place, where it is going to take place and it's controlled by examination.

Bruce: You became very conscious of yourself as a leather and very conscious of the situation you're in, in teaching at the university, but most of the university teachers just go along quite happily unconscious of what they 're really doing without thinking about teaching methods. What sort of effect do you think that has on the functioning of the learning process?

Chris: Partly it determines the purposes of the university. It makes the teachers very arrogant, it makes them very controlling. The fact that they have no training means that they're not accountable to any body or to any set of standards. The fact that teachers have no training puts them in a position of power that just no other professionals have. Teachers just aren't accountable to anyone except themselves. And occasionally younger teachers are accountable to the more dominant heads of department. But each department is a law unto itself and is accountable to faculty only in general terms. What actually happens in the classroom is at the discretion of each individual teacher and each individual teacher can be the ... biggest bastard that he wants to be.

Not only that, but he can keep it a secret from the rest of the university, because the lecture room experiences and the tutorial experiences are very private affairs. The teachers rarely talk about them to their colleagues because they don't have any generalised and shared educational vocabulary in which to talk about their experience. And if the students talk about their experiences the teachers, because they're dominant and because they have the authority of knowledge (or are supposed to have the authority of knowledge), they can invalidate what the students say.

The other effect of teachers not being trained is that it really fouls up the rationality of the examination system. Because if you're not trained as as assessor, this means that you can adjust and re-adjust your grading criteria. You can be as sloppy and as deceitful as you want in grading student essays if you don't have to tell them how you're grading them and why you're grading them. The lack of training of teachers I think is really important in keeping the university in the middle ages.

What's beginning to happen increasingly is an input from so-called educational technologists, that is course consturction, curriculum development, assessment procedures, course evaluation, examinations. These kinds of things are being scrutinised by people who are much more rational than the ordinary run of the mill teacher. Rational in terms of having definite goals, having definite educational principles and educational philosophies by which to work. And what the the technologists are doing is to cut out some of the arbitariness that untrained teachers bring to the job they do. But of course, its not cutting out the essential nature of examinations which is to grade people and fit them into a definite division of labour in the wider society.

Bruce: Can you give examples of the effect of untrained teachers on students?

Chris: Yeah. For instance, you find it in the course evaluation that I wrote ... With untrained teachers you get things like an English Department professor marking a students essay (in) 1974, and this teacher wrote (and this is all the feedback he gave to the student) 'Better at the beginning than the end, but a good piece of work anyway'. Or you get a political science teacher writing in 1970. 'I believe you don't fully understand the subject matter'. These two very terse comments came after probably 5 or 6 hours work by a student. In fact, when teachers are untrained it means they don't know how to give feedback to a student, it means they don't understand the learning situation. It means they don't understand what motivates students, what interests them. They don't understand how to have students achieve particular kinds of goals. And it means that they can play havoc with the examination system.

The reason we get different teachers giving different marks for the same pieces of work, which often happens, is that these teachers have different standards and different ideas about whats good and whats bad. Okay, so that variety. But it also means that any given student is at the mercy of an unstandardised set of criteria. Graeme Clarke, in an issue of Salient a couple of years back, had some really interesting figures about the different pass rates for similar level courses at different universities. And the discrepancies in the pass rates of students who did basically the same kind of work and who had basically the same educational level when they began the course is quite staggering. The reason for this difference, I think, lies in the fact that teachers are untrained. We have a situation where untrained teachers are affecting the life chances of students.

Parking tells us that a fair proportion of students fail their first year at university quite unnecessarily and he finds that some of the reasons for this are the malpractices of university teachers. They simply don't know how to operate as facilitators in the learning process. And they don't know how to operate as people who will assess students in a rational kind of way.

Bruce: There is talk of students getting together and doing a teacher evaluation questionnaire. Do you think this is a good thing?

Chris: There have been student evaluations of teachers before. And they're always dismissed. Except for trivial

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points like that the teacher might decide to speak more clearly. The teacher might decide to get to the tutorial on time. The teacher might decide to set a few more books, might even give out a syllabus for the course. But any basic criticism of teachers that students have, teachers are going to ignore because the basic criticisms get at the power position of teachers.

And I don't know any teachers in the university who want to share their power with students. Not when it gets to the actual learning situation. To answer this you've got to look at the purposes of the university. Essentially the job of the university is to socialize students into their future roles. That means giving the students some knowledge and probably more fundamentally giving them some basic attitudes towards work, attitudes of competitiveness of individualism and privacy. These three attitudes are ones which characterise learning at the university, just as they characterise work in the capitalist system. Students are private, they don't share their work with anybody, they work by themselves, (only occasionally do you get group projects going) and students work in isolation. Higher education is often a very private experience.

Bruce: You had no formal lectures at all in Pols 213 last year. Instead you placed yourself in among the students from the beginning of the course. You therefore weren't as isolated from them. What difference do you think this made?

Chris: What I did was not to give lectures except very infrequently and this created a lot of confusion among students and it created some anxiety in myself. We got rid of a basic format and it proved a problem. We had to decide what to put in its place. For me this was the first gain. We now had a situation where we could decide what we wanted to do. But this idea only arose because I as a dominator decided to give up some of my power.

Essentially, even though we scrapped lectures, I was still the boss, because I could turn around and say I'm going to break the contract, I'm going to have lectures. So even though you play around with lectures and you play around with seminars, and ways of conducting tutorials and rearrange examination and assessment procedures. Even though you might do this you will always have the situation where some people are in control, teachers, and some people have no control at all.

The reason for this is that students are powerless. All the attempts by students to get reas academic control of the university have failed. Students have always been fobbed off.

Students get onto Prof. Board and Council but they're always in a minority and academics ensure that this is always going to be so. I don't know of any courses in any universities which are run by the students themselves. I don't see how this could be the case in a capitalist society. Once a university in a capitalist society started doing what the participants wanted it to do it would get closed. Because the governments aren't going to fund that kind of operation.

Bruce: Why is it, do you think that the university pays so little attention to teaching. After all, most people see the university as a place of learning.

Chris: Well all education is basically political. All learning is political and all teaching is political. The universities have an ideology of academia that doesn't admit that education is political. When I say that education is political I mean that the content of what gets learned favours somebodies interests. It is not in the interests of academics to admit their political biases. Academics make a big point of avoiding doing so. They make a point of having another ideology about objectivity, the impartiality, the lack of political involvement of the intellectual game. What this means for individual teachers is a lack of their own personal involvement.

Now politics is about people and people are emotional and a lot of political activity is a combination of how people feel and how they reason. What the university has done is to cut out the emotional part of us and to act as if we only had reason. And what this does, is to effectively depoliticise the educational process. Thats one way the education process is de-politicised. Another way it is depoliticised is to have learning which is abstract away from the day to day experiences of those involved in the learning situation. Teachers will never talk about their own lives. The information they put across is distant from themselves personally and they never get into the experiences of the lives of students. What the student learns (and this is the main reason students don't get much from what they learn) is distant from him. Its in abstract from his material conditions.

What I think is happening and what is going to happen increasingly is not that teachers will understand the political nature of their work, but that education will become rationalised, it will become more efficient, it will be technologised. And this, has happened in the States and this has happened in Europe, and especially it is happening in the Open University in Britain. It might take some time, but increasingly NZ academics will become more concerned for a greater rationality in the learning process. Whether this rationality will acknowledge the fundamental political nature of education is a moot point, I don't think it will.

Bruce: The student unions in Australia and New Zealand are very concerned about assessment and have done work publicising alternatives to the present modes of assessment. Do you think that the way things are done now is particularly backward?

Chris: Very often the students are ahead of teachers in understanding how teaching needs to be rationalised and made fairer and more efficient. But, in the end, what the students are asking for is a fairer and more efficient system that discriminates.

Essentially a university education is a priviledged education. I don't know; something less than 5% of the population. It is still an education for an elite. If the National Union of Students want to champion the cause of an elite, well, thats their business. In advocating greater rationality in education they're not doing very much to expose the fundamental political nature of education.

The fundamental political aspect of higher education is in the way it services capitalism. All the university is doing is turning out qualified people for a given division of labour. All NZUSA is asking is that we do this more efficiently and with greater satisfaction to students—so they feel that they're treated more fairly, not discriminated against, aren't the victims of arbitary and whimsical activities by teachers. This isn't attacking the division of labour which we've got at present. This is what I see as more important.

Bruce: But a student union, like any other union, isn't in business to fundamentally change the work situation. The main job of a union is to defend the members' interests—to make the situation liveable for a while.

Chris: Oh no, I disagree. An active radical union would do two things; it would do what you say, it would make the situation liveable for a while, but it would also go further in exposing and describing the nature of the work situation. The student unions aren't, as they ought to be doing, describing the division of labour within the universities. There's a whole lot of sexism, a whole lot of racism, a whole lot of exploitation of labour goes on within the universities. The NZUSA are sometimes concerned with this, but not too often.

I would like to see a lot of the energy they expend in promoting a more rational education system being spent in showing the mystifications that exist within the present division of labour in the university i.e. showing the division of labour for what it is—on the one hand there's a small group of very priviledged, highly paid ideologists who are force feeding a large group of middle class people who themselves will become priviledged. I would like to see NZUSA give much greater concern to the class nature of the university. I think it should protect its members but it could do that till kingdom come.