🇳🇿
This is desperately sad and more than a little suspicious: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/top-scientist-mike-joy-loses-role-at-victoria-university/4YJSZM2OGBCF5OQFWIUIZV4U5U/
@lightweight
> There's never been a time we needed people like Dr Mike Joy in the public arena more than right now.
Damn right. I did an environmental field work paper with Mike when he worked at Massey. He's a meticulous scientist, and unapologetically outspoken about his findings, however uncomfortable that might make the political-economic elites. A national treasure. I'm guessing he got run out of Massey by Big Ag interests and now Vic too. Seriously WTF.
@lightweight
Something is rotten in the state of our universities. I suspect it has a lot to do with the consequences of the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s/90s, and the rise of managerialism that David Graeber (RIP) wrote about:
https://davidgraeber.org/papers/anthropology-and-the-rise-of-the-professional-managerial-class/
@lightweight
It's really past time those of us who are educated, *and* independent of the "professional-managerial class" (as Graeber politely describes it), launched a serious campaign to re-democratise our universities, and put them back in service of independent research and academic freedom.
@lightweight
To quote Graeber:
"Universities are—or, better said, until recently have been— among the only institutions that survived more or less intact from the High Middle Ages. As a result, universities still reflected an essentially medieval conception of self-organization and self-governance; this was an institution managed by scholars for the pursuit of scholarship, of forms of knowledge that were seen as valuable in their own right."
How do we bring this back?
In the UK there has been a lot of students protesting and demanding refunds over teaching at University, I got the impression that a lot of university was self study, a lecture gives you a brief on a topic but you need to do a lot of reading and deeper research to learn more.
Schools provide a prescribed curriculum, so when people start uni, they seem expect the same level of teaching. Not sure this is how I interpret things.
As with many topics, a curriculum is out of date by the time you have prepared the lesson content, I can give you a lecture on Enceladus (moon of Saturn) and send you off to read recent papers which cover what has been discovered right now, as we keep finding new things.
@zleap
> curriculum is out of date by the time you have prepared the lesson content
A curriculum is not as prescriptive as you imply here. It defines areas of knowledge or competence a student is meant to acquire from doing a course of study. It's up to teachers - and to some extent to students - to determine which content and practices need to go into lessons to achieve that.
Homeschoolers in Aotearoa have to teach to the NZ curriculum, but they can do that however they like.
@lightweight