Understanding the Academic World
What is learning?
What is a university?
What is academics?
University is primarily a place to pursue intellectual research. Teaching at a university is to equip students with ideas and methodology to enable students to perform independent research. Academics from their own research experience know the ideas, methods, and techniques they use for their research---in solving new problems---and they in turn teach the same to their students.
Teaching is an essential part of good research. Researchers need opportunities to communicate their work and students need to be guided into the academic way. Students and academics are mutually dependent and equal partners in research and learning. Students should clearly understand this academic process to feel comfortable at university.
The function of a university is very different from a training institution. At university you are expected to surpass what is taught to you. You are invited to follow an idea, relentlessly critique it, appreciate it, make that idea your own by having a go at solving ALL the problems that particular idea can solve, and then coming up with new ideas which propose and solve problems which the idea taught to you could not solve. In this process you not only create new ideas but also invent new problems. At training institutions, a method is taught by repetition to solve a particular problem.
Students can avoid a lot of confusion by properly understanding the function of a university and where they fit into it. Students are grist to the mill of research. Academics, though they appear to students as lecturers, are primarily researchers who come to the lectures to share their delight of understanding important ideas---an understanding that they have themselves used to discover or invent new principles and ideas. Nothing exasperates an academic more than students who are unwilling to critique the ideas they are invited to examine. In academics every idea is open for relentless criticism and it's the experience of all researchers that a critical examination of an idea is the best way to understand and master it.
In spite of wide-spread allegations that academics revel in their own abstract world, they don't bother to come to the level of students, they only respond to jargon, academics have no fixed notions of abstract or utilitarian, higher or lower levels, jargon or plain language: the only fixed notion they have is that when an idea is presented, the student should conduct a relentless examination of the idea and if it agrees with the student's intellect only then the idea should be accepted, subject to a continued life long critical evaluation.
Many students come to the university expecting to be taught because they have an in-built notion that the subject matter is so above their level that they can only be passive participants in the business of learning. Academics know that the ideas are quite simple if seen from the right point of view, i.e., with an eye to critical analysis. Students in most part don't trust academics on this and so insist on being taught but academics keep hoping that students will one day come to see that critical questioning is the easiest way to learn.
In this game of mismatched expectations, student (the customer) insists that the provider (the academic) should deliver whatever the student wants. This is much like entering a shop, attracted by its external glitter, finding the goods inside not to ones liking, and then demanding that goods from some other shop need be brought in and sold here. Academics have set their shop and advertised their wares in no uncertain terms. The customer will be well advised to give a serious thought as to what is for sale before paying for the academic wares. This manner of academic business is unchanged since the first modern day university was established about eight hundred years ago.
The role of the university is a point of confusion not only for students but also for academics. Most academics know the function of a university but some don't. But even the academics who have mixed ideas about how we teach, in most part follow some standard textbook, written by an experienced academic who knows what university education is, and so unconsciously they also educate students to be researchers. No doubt one can always find academics who don't understand university education and teach in the manner of training institutes.
Another important matter about university learning is that it uses the axiomatic method in building knowledge. This method has proved priceless in providing a focus for critical thought and the development of intellectual knowledge. Students can learn best by first understanding the axiomatic method and then using it for their own intellectual learning. At every step in learning, the student should demand to know the underlying axiom and its justification and starting from there the proof of the principle being taught. If principles are not learned this way, one will be unable to use the principles to discover new principles or ideas.
Content author: a.pota@adfa.edu.au, ITEE.