I guess, because of my age and that I’m an academic so I default to thinking education matters, I’m bemused by many of my student’s attitude to university. (I say my age because it just sounds like an observation that when I was a child was described by the then fashionable term of the ‘generation gap’. In other words it has always been so.) In the Australian education system high school is full time, students attend (for the most part), all the time. In the later years of high school all the focus turns toward what in Victoria is the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) which also serves as the ranking process for university selection. Schools are defined by their VCE success rate. Parents chase schools, suburbs, and so on based largely on nothing more than a school’s VCE success rate.
So, students treat this pretty seriously (it’s hard not to, the entire apparatus of high school, the teachers, your parents, and then uni revolves inexorably around it) and it becomes the key thing to getting in to what you want to do at uni. The key.
So we get to uni and the shackles are off. Different teaching, timetables, rules. You’re granted the autonomy of adulthood for the first time in your educational experience. Heady stuff. What is missing though is the understanding that your education shouldn’t have been thought about as getting to your preferred uni course. Because then once you’re there the default behaviour becomes that you’ve already done what was needed. What we need to instill is the realisation that it is at uni, what you learn and do here, that makes possible what happens next. Which is your life. If you realise that then university has the opportunity to be the most important educational experience of your life. However, like the real world and unlike high school, it is not delivered to you. You have to work to make it happen.
I’ll go back to telling very bad anecdotes in lectures of my childhood now.