guthrie
Posts: 696 Joined: Jan. 2006
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Quote (Louis @ April 08 2008,03:29) | I'd agree to an extent. I find the drive to seperate teaching and research in academia to be a bloody stupid one. You don't understand an idea until you've had to explain it to an 18 year old undergrad who is not interested in the subject and highly interested in the girl/boy two feet away from him/her. |
Some random thoughts, bearing in mind it is a few years since I left uni and I didn't know anything then.*
In theory, splitting teaching and research might be good, if you therefore had good, trained teachers effectively teaching students more of the basic stuff they need to know. In reality, what it would mean is minimum wage knowledge regurgitation, because that is all the gvt is willing to pay for. Then for research, in my opinion, too much university research these days is oriented towards commercial gain. I say let the companies do their own damned research, that will give the graduates jobs to do after they finish uni.
* This is another rant of mine- some bodies, especially regulatory ones, think it is perfectly sensible to recruit new graduates. No, it isn't. New graduates are innocent and know nothing, so will completely miss the stuff they are supposed to pick up on, eg the fact that a company is putting lots of phenol down the drain.
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