Skip to main content

Slackademia

Teaching can be rewarding (though not financially). I recently finished my third year as a visiting tutor at Massey University's design school at the Albany campus in Auckland.

This year the experience wasn't very positive - or, perhaps, it was.

I am worried about the calibre of students. Universities have become very competitive in their drive to fill seats in classes. Students have become economic units - EFTs. As a result I believe the entry requirements are not rigorous enough and, as a result, graduating students are benchmarked against a low bar. Though my students are studying design I was shocked by their lack of literacy - by that I mean familiarity with contemporary and historical thought about the subject of design and its associated fields. With few exceptions the quality of written presentations was dire. I found little to enjoy whn marking essays or written assignments.

Perhaps most worrying was a lack of real inquiry. Often thoughts progressed little further than what could be cut and pasted from the Wikipedia. Some students would suggest a research topic at the beginning of a semester. When counseled about the merit of their proposal some would struggle to get their heads around a) that 'good enough isn't good enough' - having been spoon-fed and coddled through-out their entire educational life b)ideas take work to develop - I don't remember who said it but"There is nothing more dangerous that an idea - if it the only one you have."
There was little apparent (to me) desire to explore ideas in original or new ways. Risk was avoided at all costs.

My students were all nice kids but I feel they have been let down by a systemic failure to challenge them or instill a sense of discipline or drive. One or two showed promise, but they will emerge into the world after a fourth year of study with degrees, some craft skills but will remain, functionally clueless.

Visiting the graduation shows for Massey, AUT and Auckland University I felt depressed at the thought that we might have reached a 'sputnik' moment - where we will be overtaken by emerging countries. Without a considerable amount of energy going into rigorous, disciplined exploration of ideas - with brilliant execution we are going to find our design industries and the potential for growth are stunted. We need to shake the flabby post-modern irony and cynicism and remember that a Magnum Opus is a great WORK and not a sneering mash-up in the latest style trend.

(In three years I never over-heard an impassioned discussion about design or design issues happening between students - is there something in the water?).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Addict-o-matic

A cool resource for you to try. Aggregates search topics from a number of sources. Thanks to Brand DNA (again) for the heads-up.

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St