Academic 'afraid' to criticise standards

[letric]

One of Britain's most eminent academics, Dennis Harding, emeritus professor of archeology and former vice principal at Edinburgh University, argues that rising A-level grades disguise the perception of employers that recruits are
"increasingly illiterate and conventionally innumerate" Academics meanwhile, are too often cowed into silence by strict disciplinary codes and gagging clauses that apply if the retire early. Protests by undergraduates, angry at cuts in teaching hours being reduced. .....timesonline.co.uk/news........Jack Grimston

[letric]

I love my children, but I am not in love with them. I love my children but I do not always like them, therefore I love inspite of............

[ebony02]

Please seek psychological help.

[letric]

While I fail to understand your reason, hasten assure you thought will be given to your advice. Incidentaly it was an answer in reply to the question am I bipolar

[vaio]

:? :?

[letric]

The standard of education seems to have decreased,by selecting undergraduates with limited numeracy, and lliteracy skills, which are below standards thus creating cause for concern. As written by Dennis Harding at timesonline.co.uk/education

[shield_2006]

The standard of education seems to have decreased,by selecting undergraduates with limited numeracy, and lliteracy skills, which are below standards thus creating cause for concern. As written by Dennis Harding at timesonline.co.uk/education

IMHO-proper and effective training can offset any exam oriented deficiency in young persons and this elitist view of education is what has been transferred to societies like Trinidad and Tobago and which continues to bedevil our ability to employ our citizens in meaningful jobs.

[letric]

The real purpose of an education is to impart to students the ability to analyse and solve problems. Learning is knowledge acquired through studying. Interpretation is to elucidate/explain. Comprehension is the uderstanding of what has been taught.

[letric]

The nature of education, its goals, proper methods , and effects have long been a matter of argument, education has been a matter of concern not only to the individual child who is to be educated, and to his parents , but to the whole society who is responsible for its provision. What subjects children are taught, how and where they are taught, and how many of them are taught and for how long, whether all are equally provided with education - all these questions are of interest to the whole of society, and the answers to them will determine the character of that society. In Emile(1762)Rousseau presented a view of childhood and human nature which continues to inform educational thinking. He argued that it was the institutions of society which corrupted man. He reacted against the coercive nature of the authoritarian society of his time. 'From the beginning' he writes, 'to the end of life civilized man is a slave. At birth he is sewn up in swaddling bands, and at death nailed down in a coffin.'

[letric]

A particular linguistic form is grammatical if it conforms to all requirements of the grammar of the language variety it belongs to. But a form may be fully grammatical in standard English and yet still fail to be normal, acceptable, or intelligible. Here is an example produced by a British Prime Minister: Trial by television is the day that freedom dies.This is fully grammatical, but it is senseless, since a trial cannot be a day.

[letric]

Sceptic, skeptic.......
A sceptic in British English but a skeptic in American English, these two spellings represent the same pronunciation. The derived adjectives are likewise sceptical and skeptical.

[letric]

Admissions have been made by Oxford tutors they routinely "discount" the grades of privately educated applicants in an attempt to increase the numbers of places they award pupils from state schools.

[letric]

Education not only books and music.....it's asking questions all the time. There are millions of us, all over the world, and no one, not one of us is asking questions, we are taking the easiest way out

- Roots (1959) act.3

[snowbird]

The standard of education seems to have decreased,by selecting undergraduates with limited numeracy, and lliteracy skills, which are below standards thus creating cause for concern. As written by Dennis Harding at timesonline.co.uk/education

IMHO-proper and effective training can offset any exam oriented deficiency in young persons and this elitist view of education is what has been transferred to societies like Trinidad and Tobago and which continues to bedevil our ability to employ our citizens in meaningful jobs.

Exactly, far too many see a particular course of study, and it's result as an end rather than a beginning. In terms of Acedemic ability..... I see any achievement as a sign of..... "I can learn", I can be further trained, rather than ....."I have learned", I am an expert.

(not sure if this respose addressed the topic...I'm not an academic :lol: just my two cents)

[Wayne]

lectric.....dis dennis harding really "ticked" you off, din he mate?.......with his pomposity.

[letric]

Enyaw...Dennis Harding expressed an opinion. The matter speaks for itself. However, should like your opinion on an article written by Dana Seetahal 'Profiling the youths' if you are interested, do a search in the archives. Letting me have a feed-back, perhaps, when we meet in Trinidad?

[letric]

In the eighteenth century, the philosopher *Rousseau (1712 -78) thought of education as child-centred. In Emile he propounded the theory that child would flourish if allowed to grow freely in his own way and his own time, not forced or stunted by too much teaching. He was not concerned with who should be educated, but only with how a child, any child should or should not be taught. He thought education is the 'true' sense as a natural process, and therefore believed that all children, regardless of class or status, could benefit from it. However at the time when Rousseau wrote, education was narrowly spread. It was a luxury to which by no means everyone could aspire. Though there had long existed charity schools, and the provision of for poor scholars, the beneficiaries were comparatively few. John Stuart *Mill (1806-73) a man of education, once introduced a child to the infinite resources of reading and learning, and taste, his sensibility, and his understanding of true political goals, would all inevitably be elevated. His need must pursue the higher. Therefore in On Liberty (1859) he argued that the state should require all children to be educated, at least so that they could read, write, and calculate, but should not itself provide that education.

[letric]

The educated classes are learning to blame ideas for our troubles, rather than...our own bad thinking. This is the great vice of academicism, that it is concerned with ideas rather than with thinking, and nowadays the errors of academicism...make their own way into the world, and what begins as a failure of perception among intellectual specialists finds its fulfilment in policy and action.

The Liberal Imagination. (1950) 'The Sense of the Past'

[letric]

We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and, when
got, the repose is insupportable'

The Education of Henry James.(1907) CH.29

[kemist]

The standard of education seems to have decreased,by selecting undergraduates with limited numeracy, and lliteracy skills, which are below standards thus creating cause for concern. As written by Dennis Harding at timesonline.co.uk/education

IMHO-proper and effective training can offset any exam oriented deficiency in young persons and this elitist view of education is what has been transferred to societies like Trinidad and Tobago and which continues to bedevil our ability to employ our citizens in meaningful jobs.


We just can't get away from exams, they are vital in whatever form they may be. There must be some measurement of a persons ability in a given field. Another thing is that there would be different views on what constitutes "proper and effective training". This would be dependent on the nature of the job that the student is training for. In some cases, this would mean that the student knows just enough to be able to follow a procedure, in other cases, the student would be required to use logic and reasoning to solve practical problems. So there must be some sort of standards set to determine a person's ability. What i do support however, are different forms of testing a person's ability, so that exams are not just limited to written exams. For instance, designing a curriculum that doesn't encourage the student to just 'cram' last minute for their tests. Oral exams may be the best form, but i know that would be practically impossible to implement.

[letric]

Once the philosophy of educational needs is accepted, the criteria of which education is judged to be good or bad become immediately extremely wide and varied. It is no longer adequate to raise the simple question 'is education justly distributed?' or the supposedly more philosophical question 'Is the curriculum appropriate to the common frame work?'.' On the contrary, the first question must be ' Does this kind of education? work? Is this child or that child actually learning anything?, and then the second question must be: 'If he is learning something, what do we hope will come of it - exactly how will he benefit?' The philosophy and the action can hardly be any longer be separated.

[letric]

Chinua Achebe, the father of African literature. In 1958, he produced one of the great novels of the 20th century.
It tells the story of Okonkwo, a brilliant, brutal, fatally proud Igbo warrior who was brought down by his own
confrontation with missionaries. The book made Achebe, in Nadine Gordimer's words, the
"father of
modern African Literature".
www.timesonline.co.uk/bookshop

[letric]

The English speaking world may be divided into
(1) those who neither know nor care what a split
infinitive is (2) those who do not know, but care
very much; (3) those who know and condemn;
(4) those who know and approve; and (5) those
who know and distinguish. Those who neither
know nor care are the vast majority and are a
happy folk, to be envied by most of the
minority classes.


Modern English Usage (1926)

[letric]

The notion ' grammatical' cannot be identified
with 'meaningful' or 'significant' in any semantic
sense. Sentences (1) and (2) are equally
nonsensical, but ...only the former is
grammatical.
(1) Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
(2) Furiously sleep ideas green colourless.

Syntactic Structures (1957) ch. 2


]

[letric]

The word
reasoning describes two associated processes: searching for such reasons, and giving them when you or somebody else has found them. A third process, gaining understanding of reasons that somebody else has given, is similar. Suppose you have *reasons for believing you have been lied to, or reasons against visiting the dentist. These are mental states, states of holding reasons for, or against, believing something or doing something or feeling somehow. Now, searching for reasons involves cogitation and commonly also - though this is not reasoning - research. If you are confronted by practical problem
What should I do on this matter? or a theoretical problem
What is the truth of this matter? solving it is bound to involve some cogitation, however perfunctory: you must bring to mind further questions that seem relevant to solving the problem, you must ponder their relevance, and, if you have answers to them, you must finally derive a solution, in the light of the answers.
C.A.K.


R. Descartes, Rules for Direction of the Mind and Discourse on the Method

[letric]

Under half of degree students have A-levels.

Schools are pushing students towards vocational courses
that are shunned by top universities as reported by
Jack Grimston additional reporting Rebecca Seales

www.timesonline.co.uk
Education 11.04.10

[letric]

Knowledge by acquaintance, and knowledge by
description. This distinction was made by Bertrand
*Russell. Knowledge by acquaintance is 'what we
derive from sense', which does not imply 'even the
smallest "knowledge about". For Russell knowledge
is primarily - and all knowledge depends upon - the
'knowledge by acquaintance of sensations', but
when this is expressed in language, and organised
by common sense, we have knowledge by description.
RLG
Russell, B. (1914).

[letric]

It is useful to distinguish 'knowing how' from
'knowing what', for knowledge includes the skills
of knowing and how to make effective use of
individual facts. and generalisations.



Knowledge by acquaintance, and knowledge by
description. This distinction was made by Bertrand
*Russell. Knowledge by acquaintance is 'what we
derive from sense', which does not imply 'even the
smallest "knowledge about". For Russell knowledge
is primarily - and all knowledge depends upon - the
'knowledge by acquaintance of sensations', but
when this is expressed in language, and organised
by common sense, we have knowledge by description.
RLG
Russell, B. (1914).

[letric]

Though people sometimes urge that politics
should be kept out of education, the fact that
education is necessarily a political issue.
For one thing, education itself is an expression
of values, moral and political as well as academic

[letric]

The criterion which we use to test the
genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the
criterion of verifiability. We can say a sentence
is factually significant to any given person, if,
and only if, he knows how to verify the
preposition which it purports to express - that is,
if he knows what observations would lead him,
under certain conditions, to accept the
proposition as being true, or reject it as being
false.



A.J.A

[letric]

In education there should be no class distinction.


W.C.

[letric]

Is it not a pleasure to learn and to repeat or
practice from time to time what has been
learned? Is it not delightful to have friends
coming from afar? Is one not a superior man if
he does not feel hurt even though he does not
feel recognised?

Analects ch. 1. v1





Though people sometimes urge that politics
should be kept out of education, the fact that
education is necessarily a political issue.
For one thing, education itself is an expression
of values, moral and political as well as academic

[letric]

I came upstairs into the world; for I was born in
a cellar.

William Congreve (1670-1720)



In education there should be no class distinction.


W.C.

[letric]

How often have I said to you that when you
have eliminated the impossible, whatever
remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
A.C.


The criterion which we use to test the
genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the
criterion of verifiability. We can say a sentence
is factually significant to any given person, if,
and only if, he knows how to verify the
preposition which it purports to express - that is,
if he knows what observations would lead him,
under certain conditions, to accept the
proposition as being true, or reject it as being
false.



A.J.A

[letric]

Rousseau understood adolescence, the moods and
instability associated with the urgency of sexual-
development. His views about sex education
are still pertinent. "If your pupil cannot be kept
ignorant of sex differences up to 16 make sure he
learns about them before 10." This strength of
Rousseau's, his trust in an intuitive understanding
of the nature and needs of children, remains a
positive stimulus to educational thought and
practice. His belief in the essential goodness
of human nature may be a myth but it is a more
sustaining one than it s converse. There are also
dangers: a distrust of accumulated human knowledge
an anti intellectualism than can lead to worship or
unreason, an over-reliance on feeling as a sufficient
basis for sane human action. His profound distrust for
institutions, however, has proved well justified: as
we are struggling to make schools good places for
children to learn in.
CH/NS

[letric]

Science is fact. Just as houses are made of
stones, so science is made of facts. But a
pile of stones is not a house, and a collection
of facts is not necessarily a science.




Henri Poincare

[letric]

When, in any intellectual discipline, a theory is
proposed, there will be some propositions that are
regarded as fundamental, or first, principles of the theory.
This is in contrast to other prepositions which, although
part of the theory, are consequences of, or follow from,
these fundamental principles. According to Aristotle,
first principles will take the form of either definitions,
postulates, or axioms.The Aristotelian definition of an
axiom is that it is a principle common to all sciences,
which is self-evidently true but incapable of proof. A
postulate on the other hand is a principle specific
to a given science which is assumed without proof and
whose truth may not be self-evident.

[letric]

Language and knowledge are all about ideas, words stand for
nothing else. If so, then clearly language and knowledge about
the mind must be about ideas, and according to later entries George
Berkeley said the very existence of Ideas constitutes the soul ... Mind is
a congeries of Perceptions .... but, besides all that endless variety of ideas
or objects of knowledge, there is likewise something which knows or
perceives them; and exercises divers operations , as willing, imagining,
remembering, about them. This perceiving, active being is what I call
MIND, SPIRIT, SOUL, or MYSELF .... It is clear that, in this strange
doctrine, with its evident rejection of any public, objective time
ordering, desperate paradoxes lurk, and one can only speculate
how Berkeley might have tried to deal with them, or alternatively
how he might have so modified his theory of the mind as to avoid
them.

GJW

[letric]

If dictionaries were really to help us be clear-headed about the whole
subject, regarding free will they might speak of the main
question as a question of our freedom. They might use
the term free will just in connection with undetermined choices.
It is revelant that, as used to be said and as still is conveyed by other
terms, such as choices are somehow owed to our wills, or indeed a
faculty called the Will. It could usefully be added that
such choices can be spoken of as originated, since they come
about without certain effects and yet are definitely not understood
as chance or random events. Finally, it would be useful to speak of
choices that do not go against our desires and natures as being
voluntary.

[letric]

Herbert Spencer (1828-1903) fist book on Education remained a standard
text for many decades. Today one point of pursuing Spencer lies in trying to
understand something of the reasons for his great appeal in his own time. The
immense popularity of his works due to a special way in which it is reflected
some of the preoccupations of his own generation. Spencer had no formal
education. He believed this to be a great advantage which
left me free from bias given by plexus of traditional ideas and sentiments,
and he adds:
I did not trouble myself with the generalisations of others. And
that indeed indicated my general attitude. All along I have looked at things through
my own eyes and not through the eyes of others.
In later life he was never able to work for long. and his reading was severly curtailed.


Peel, J.D.Y. (1971)

[letric]

The issue of the extent and limits of human *knowledge is a perplexing one.
There is no way of establishing a proportion between what we know and do
not. We clearly cannot estimate the amount of knowledge yet to be discovered,
(both because there is no real measure of what is known and because we
have no reliable information regarding new knowledge yet to come). We
realise that our knowledge contains errors of omission and commission but do
not know just where they lie.

[letric]

Is it not in the power of professors of
demonstrative sciences to change their opinions at
pleasure, and adopt first one side and then the other


Galileo

[letric]

In education there should be no class distinction.


W.C.



The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with
the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is
thinking with the minority, and the first-rate mind is only
happy when it is thinking.
A.A. Milne

[letric]

Galileo

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands
things for itself, the other appreciates what others can
understand, the third understands neither for itself nor
through others. The first kind is excellent, the second
good and the third kind useless

Niccolo Machiavelli

[letric]

I have therefore found it necessary to deny
knowledge in order to make room for faith


Immanuel Kant

[letric]

Modular A-levels could be phased out in favour of a return to
traditional exams at the end of two-year courses the education
secretary said

... wants the exams to be more academically rigorous than the current format....
universities had complained that A-levels were not preparing student sufficiently well.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/10500453.stm?1sm

[letric]

There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands
things for itself, the other appreciates what others can
understand, the third understands neither for itself nor
through others. The first kind is excellent, the second
good and the third kind useless

Niccolo Machiavelli



Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's
ignorance.
Confucius

[letric]

Until knowledge is understood in human and
political terms as something to be won to the
service of coexistence and community, not of
particular race, nations, or religions, the future
augurs badly.
E.W.S.

[letric]

Probably the most widely accepted factorial description
of intelligence is a hierarchical one. An excellent example
of this class descriptions was proposed by P.E. Vernon
(1971). He proposed that intelligence can be described
as comprising abilities at varying levels of generality: at
the highest level of generality is general ability; at the
next level are 'major group' factors, such as verbal-
educational ability needed for successful performance
in courses. The factorial one is intelligence largely in-
herited, as has been claimed by some, or is it largely
or exclusively determined by environment as has been
claimed. Few bodies of evidence are more confused than
that dealing with the heritability of intelligence. The
probabiity is that heredity, environment all play some role
in intelligence as it has traditionally been measured. but it
not all clear what the relative extents of these roles are.
P.E.Vernon (1971)
The Structure of Human Abilities.

[aprillove20]

I agree that learning is knowledge acquired through studying.