tim's experiment

For people who were kids in the 50s, sequences of three digits conjure up long forgotten visions of steam locomotives. In the days of steam a locomotive was classified by three digits which told you the number of driving wheels — the middle figure — and the number of other wheels in front and behind. So Thomas the Tank Engine was 0-6-0, the Titfield Thunderbolt was 0-4-4, the exquisitely beautiful Stirling Single was 2-2-4 and the record-breaking Mallard was 4-6-2. And so on. The numbers were always even, because the locomotive wheels always came in pairs: one each side. To those of us raised with this system the arrival of 3-3-4 suggests a railway engine designed by an idiot, with one or two wheels missing. Unfortunately on closer acquaintance with Hong Kong’s so-called educational reforms they still suggest a machine designed by an idiot, with one or two wheels missing.

In the two decades I have been working in Hong Kong higher education I cannot recall an innovation which inspired less enthusiasm and confidence. Universities and their components are already setting up Crisis Committees — under a variety of tactful names — to deal with the crises confidently expected. We do not know what the crisis will be yet but that there will be one is not in doubt. This is one of Donald Rumsfeld’s “known unknowns”.

The problem is not with the principle of the thing. Whether young people should spend — broadly speaking — the period between their 17th and 18th birthdays in the last year of school or the first year of university does not make a great deal of difference, as long as the total remains the same … which it will. Under the new system there will be an increase in the number of students staying until age 17, then a decrease in the year until 18, and then the same number as there is now. The implementation is the problem.

When the idea of four-year degrees was first mooted, all sorts of university people had interesting ideas for the use which could be made of the extra time. This decision, however, was ruthlessly preempted by the Heads of Universities Committee, which without consulting anyone audibly, decided that the extra year would be spent on a preparatory year of General Education. We need to be careful in our wording here, because some people have described this as “a liberal general education”, or “a general liberal education”. which is misleading. Liberal education has nothing to do with it.

Liberal education is an idea usually ascribed eroneously to the 19th century divine Cardinal Newman, who used the term in a detailed (but not implemented) plan for a new university in Ireland. But this grossly overstates Newman’s influence. Liberal education is a widespread explanation for the university curriculum because the great Prussian educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt embodied it in German universities, whence it was exported by immigrants to America. In some parts of the 20th century the fact that much of the American university education system was based on German models was … embarassing. But even Humboldt’s fans admit that he did not invent the concept either. It can already be found in Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1765, and it is clear from the way Blackstone used the term that he expected readers to be familiar with it. As you might expect from this era Liberal Education was intended for aristocrats, as an alternative to the then traditional university education, which was intended for priests. The hope was that young aristocrats could be persuaded to take an interest in more edifying pursuits than the traditional aristocratic hobbies: sex, husbandry and hunting, with occasional warfare. Indeed Blackstone defends law as a part of the liberal curriculum (he was the first Professor of Law at Oxford) on the grounds that it would prepare students for their future roles as Justices of the Peace and MPs. Both of these jobs were at the time entirely unpaid roles, taken up by people who had time and money to spare. But Liberal Education on this model is not a free-for-all. It requires the study of specific components, basically classical (i.e. ancient Greek and Roman) history and philosophy. This was not the doddle now offered under the label of Classical Studies because the Greek and Roman works were to be read in the original languages. By the time of Humboldt some pure science had been added but the ancients were still there. The degree course was supposed to explore the foundations of knowledge, not tour the whole building.

General education is a different kettle of curriculum. It provides some basic required subjects distributed around the university, and requires the student to spread his patronage around: so many subjects in the Science
Faculty, so many in Business, so many in Arts, and so forth. This actually has very little to do with the educational merits of syllabus tourism, and a great deal to do with the convenience of university administrators. If they are honest (which they rarely are on this topic) they will admit that the great merit of forcing students to spread their attention is that this cushions the administrative inconvenience caused by changes in the popularity of different subjects. Let us say the number who wish to take Sewerage Studies halves, and the number wishing to take Logical Positivism doubles. We still do not have to fire sewage specialists, or hire philosophers, because the students must in any case spend half of their time spreading their custom around the university. So there will still be some demand for sewage and the effect on philosophy will be halved.

However in order to convince us all of the merits of General Education a large number of eager enthusiasts were imported, with the consequence that at some universities the idea did not stop at the end of the first year, but effectively consumed the second. In effect, committees devoted to planning the new four-year curriculum found that they barely had room for what they were doing in three. In fact in some places, including the one where I still occasionally push the Powerpoint, the eventual total was somewhat less. Students studying Journalism in the new four-year programme will have 45 units of Journalism out of a total of 120. In the old system they had 54 from 90something. Personally I do not think this is an improvement. Some planners, quite understandably under the circumstances, decided that they really were not called on to do anything new at all: they simply dropped the old three-year curriculum into the space remaining and left it at that.

Enthusiasm was not encouraged by other things which were going on at the same time. The UGC continued its efforts to sort out local universities into five sheep (mainly teaching) and three goats (mainly research). Previous attempts in this direction had been a total failure. All the UGC-funded institutions want to be research universities so they all pumped up their research output. The UGC’s latest wheeze replaces research output as the key to prosperity with the results of a competition which the goats are expected to win. Money will be bestowed on those who are successful in garnering competitive research grants. Woe to the researcher whose work does not happen to require a large grant. He is likely to be unpopular. Universities bidding for the goat category redoubled their efforts to push staff into doing more, and more competitive, research. At the same time the UGC unveiled its new bid to appear to take teaching seriously. This is called OBTL (Outcome Based Teaching and Learning) and posits an elaborate structure of planned and advertised objectives, methods, activities and evaluations, leading to course objectives which support programme objectives, which in turn are conducive to Graduate Attributes sought by the whole university. Complaints that this was a negation of university education, in particular because of the insistence that nothing should be taught unless it could be counted immediately at the end of each course, were met by the reply that people complaining “did not understand” OBTL. I must say this came as a surprise to me. Trying to help colleagues to get their heads round this system I find that the more they know about it the less they like it. One wonders what Humbold would have thought of it. Well actually we know what Humboldt would have thought of it, because he thought of educational institutions as working communities entailing the exchange of ideas between professors and students, not sausage factories in which students would be stuffed with predetermined dollops of knowledge. “The university teacher is no longer the teacher, and the student is no longer the learner, but himself does research, with the professor guiding his research and supporting him in it.” Clearly whatever we are doing it is not Liberal Education in the traditional sense. Anyway whether you like OBTL or not it involved another avalanche of unsought extra work, so some reluctance to consider the finer points of the four-year curriculum was to be expected.

The first four-year problem will probably be admissions. The university heads also bent their brains to this problem, and ordained that admission to all programmes should be initially to the faculty or school, with students choosing their Major later. Exceptions were made (only a foolhardy Vice Chancellor would meddle in the arrangements of the doctors and lawyers) for “professional programmes”. But for the rest of us, Faculty or School it is. The problem with this is that as a result there will be thousands of applicants to each portal. And as the new examination system offers a much narrower range of grades than the old one did, many of them will be difficult to tell apart. But as there will be thousands of applicants it will not be possible to take other things into account, much less do anything really time-consuming like interviews. So the results will be reinterpreted in a variety of interesting ways to differentiate the students. This, by a gross misuse of language, is called “broad-based admission”. Students who fear that their chances of success in the new system are difficult to predict are quite right. A small collection of results will be tweaked in a variety of ways to magnify differences between students, so quite small differences in your exam success may make a very large difference to your chances of going to the university you really want. The attraction to universities is, as usual, administrative convenience. Once they have admitted you it is too late to change so if quotas force you into a Major you didn’t want then you will have to lump it. Students will have to conform to the university’s plan, not the other way round.

There is an emerging theme here. When university reform is conducted on a top-down basis the convenience of administrators’ effortlessly trumps the desires of the people actually doing the teaching, while their victims — the students — are not considered or consulted at all. Of couse the new system is being presented as a benefit to students. How could they say anything else? General education, we are told, will introduce students to the whole wide range of human knowledge. This is a worthy objective, but one unlikely to be achieved by leading the horse to the trough and then holding its nose underwater. There are plenty of ways in which interested students can broaden the range of their knowledge without them being dragooned into doing so at the taxpayer’s expense. Or we are told that this new arrangement will help students to make a more informed choice of Major. This will no doubt be true for students who arrive at university with little or no idea of what they want to do, though they will probably not be allowed to leave the faculty which admitted them. But what about the student who knows and loves his subject already, and expects the university to allow him to extend and deepen his appreciation of it? He will probably not welcome a compulsory year of academic tourism, even if the spots visited are interesting — an optimistic assessment.

We seem to be moving towards a system in which your first degree is largely spent on paying tribute to the university system and the people who run it in their own interests. If your chosen career actually has educational requirements you will have to do a Master’s degree, at considerable extra expense on a self-funding (for which read profit-making) basis. This is not a wildly attractive prospect. Indeed I understand educational officials actually expect about 30 per cent of the potential users of the new system to give it a miss. For a little more money and a lot less time you can go to the UK and choose a degree devoted to the subject of your choice which you will complete in three years. Those of us who work in Hong Kong universities are often asked for advice about degree choices. A depressing number of us find we have to mention this exodus as an attractive choice for those who can afford it.