OXFORD AS I SEE IT

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 669.

FAMOUS EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENTS IN GREAT BRITAIN

Ex.1 Read the text “ Oxford as I see it” and while reading try to find the answers to the following questions:

What is the secret of teaching methods used in Oxford University?

What position do lectures occupy at Oxford?

What is the role of the tutor in the process of turning students into “ripe scholars?

( The impressions of a university professor after having visited Oxford)

Being a university professor, I was naturally deeply interested in the system of education in England. I was therefor led to make a special visit to Oxford. Arriving one afternoon at four o'clock I stayed at the Mitre hotel and did not leave until eleven o'clock next morning. The whole of this time, except for one hour spent in addressing the undergraduates, was devoted to a close and eager study of the great university.

Oxford is a noble university. It has a great past. It is at present the greatest university in the world and it is quite possible that it has a great future. Oxford trains scholars of the real type better than any other place in the world. Its methods are antiquated. It despises science. Its lectures are rotten. It has professors who never teach and students who never learn. It has no order, no system. Its curriculum is unintelligible. Yet – it gets there!

It can hardly be due to anything in the curriculum or program of studies. Indeed, to any one accustomed to the best model in the United States and Canada, the program of studies is frankly laughable. Hardly a single professor at Oxford would recognize a dynamo if he met it in broad daylight. The Oxford student learns nothing of chemistry, physics, heat, plumbing.

Strange as it may seem to us, there are no courses at Oxford in Housekeeping, or in Salesmanship, or in Advertising, or on the influence of the Press. There are no lectures whatever on Human Behaviour or on the Play of Wild Animals. Apparently the Oxford student does not learn these things.

The comparison shows the peculiar position occupied at Oxford by the Professor's lectures. In the colleges of Canada and the United States the lectures are supposed to be a necessary and useful part of the student's training. At Oxford it is not so. The lectures are given and may even be taken. But they are quite worthless and are not supposed to have anything to do with the development of the student's mind. “The lectures here,” said one Canadian student , “ are certainly rotten”. Other judgments were that lectures here were of no importance, that nobody took them, that they don't matter, that you can take them if you like, that they do you no harm.

I understand that the key to this mystery is found in the operations of the person called the tutor. It is from him, or rather with him, that the students learn all they know, one and all are agreed on that. Yet it is a little odd to know how he does it. “We go over to his rooms, “ said one student, “and he just lights a pipe and talks to us.” “ We sit round with him,” said another, “and he simply smokes and goes over our exercises with us.” From this and other evidence I gather that what an Oxford tutor does is to get a little group of students together and smoke at them. Men who have been systematically smoked at for four years turn into ripe scholars. If anybody doubts this , let him go to Oxford and he can see the thing actually in operation. A well- smoked man speaks and writes English with a grace that can be acquired in no other way.

The more I reflect on the matter, the more I'm convinced that the real thing for the student is the life and environment that surrounds him. All that he really learns he learns, in a sense, by active operation of his own intellect and not as a passive recipient of lectures. And for this active operation what he really needs most is the continued and intimate contact with his fellows. Students must live together and eat together, talk and smoke together. Experience shows that that is how their minds really grow.

( After Stephen Leacock )