VC’ s corner campusreview. com. au
Take time and choose wisely
The education system – and students themselves – are locking into qualifications and career choices far too early.
By Simon Maddocks
Orientation Week has come and gone for another year of Semester 1 intakes, and there is already a cohort of students beginning to question whether they have made the right choice about their study program. It’ s something we accommodate in universities for some months every year, as students rearrange enrolment choices, change their degree streams or even move institutions. These can be difficult issues for students, and I wonder at times whether our system is getting students to make career decisions at too early a point in their lives.
What is the basis for the trend to stream students earlier and earlier within the school system? These and other experiments with pedagogy( remember phonetic spelling?) fuel a growing concern that we are failing to deliver an appropriate experience with what has become a less than effective system. We generate too many graduates who carry false expectations of employment in their core disciplines, and whose narrow graduate attributes reduce their broader employment prospects as a consequence.
I sense that the technological revolution has driven part of this – students have access to a much wider set of information resources than at any other time in history. And so they present an argument to progress more rapidly through subject matter and seek to achieve academic benchmarks earlier. Yet such progression can lack context and relevant life experience. Unqualified internet sources are regularly offered up by students as an appropriate reference for some purported“ fact”, that if one stops and thinks about it, quickly clarifies as extreme if not clearly wrong. We are failing our students, and we are failing our future national capability if we don’ t do something about this.
I am a biological scientist by training, so far be it from me to provide any sociological perspective on learning paradigms. But as a parent and educator, I know how challenging the late teens can be as young adults work out who they are and what their place in the world might be. It is not hard to understand why this seems to be the time of life to experiment with a diversity of new experiences, to try new things( including at times anti-social and less savoury opportunities), to push the boundaries and challenge the norms. Our role as a society should be to provide a balanced and safe environment in which such exploration can be appropriately supported and counselled.
But instead, this is when we ask our students to make career-defining choices at school, to choose( in simple terms) humanities or sciences, academic or vocational frameworks – to basically restrict their options and limit their choices. On what basis do students have the capacity to commit to these defining decisions? And at the same time, we are counterintuitively proffering the wisdom that most of them will have four or five different and possibly quite disparate careers during their working lives. This must surely suggest they need a breadth of educational experiences, too, starting from a more holistic foundation.
I was one of those students who took a gap year between Year 12 and starting
16