Dear Allen, so many points you raise I want to take further but don't know
how, other than to put down my experience "for what it's worth", and ask
you to excuse my cutup of your text, trying to keep my mind on the track.

On Mon, 21 Apr 1997, kaa45 wrote:
> what i wanted to say about involving education in writing ... issues
about what composition means ... or how are aesthetic positions put into
practice if they are thought about ... and very little about necessity.

- it seems to me that writing is taught very badly in British Higher ed.
By "writing" I mean all aspects of it - how to put an essay together and
onwards. The argument seems to be, o, students learn to write as they go,
you can't teach it, it's not our job to curb their natural style... which
isn't an argument I've much sympathy with. Most UK students haven't really
had the oportunity to think about writing as practice when they blunder
into University, so their "natural style" will remain just that - give or
take a few tricks picked up to make the term projects look good.
"Necessity" - in terms of the necessity of the made thing - doesn't get
much of a look in.

> one subject will be innovation and what is it ... what do you innovate
from?
> 
- again, how much room for "innovation" can there be in an HE Syllabus? So
many procedural points (course assessment, teaching assessment, etc, etc)
mitigate against affording the spontaneity of "making it new" at any
level. Hoop-and-hurdle-jumping seems to be more often the (perhaps
justifiable) concern of many BUT NOT ALL undergraduates.

> i suspect this begins to be about what group of people are being educated 
> or what is education?  who is it and where are they?  in a position after 
> 'A' levels or after GCSE or is it later than that?  is this already too 
> late?  how old were you when you got excited by poetry and how did that 
> happen?  were you at the university interview for Enlish Lit and had 
> never read a poem you weren't asked to?

- Or, if a group of UK English Lit. undergraduates find it tough to handle
the line "Boasts time mocks cumber Rome. Wren"... , then how come I can
present the same lime, no trouble, to a group of Czech history students? 
Neither GCSE nor A levels actually encourage the act of *reading* - which
I take to be a precursor, if only by a short distance, of writing :
someone else has to do that. It usually comes down to individual impact,
individual response, and I don't see this in anyone's education manifesto. 
The "we/they" divide between teachers (including librarians) and students
is a symptom, rather than the problem itself. 

> One of the solutions to this has to do with the idea of research and what 
> is it and how does it engage personal interest and necessity

- so that the first necessity in education might be curiosity - just one
of the aspects of personal development NOT charted by GCSE/Alevel. 

Perhaps my experience as a parent (together with dim memories of my own
schooldays) is colouring this: I've seen real innovative drive develop,
bash against the "education process", move sidewise and carry on *in spite
of* the process which is supposed to foster it. 

A very moany post. Sorry, all you education folk, and look forward to
being proved wrong. 
___________________________________________________________
Richard Caddel
Durham University Library, Stockton Rd., Durham DH1 3LY, UK
E-mail: R.I.Caddel @ durham.ac.uk   
Phone: +44 (0)191 374 3044    Fax: +44 (0)191 374 7481               
WWW: http://www.dur.ac.uk/~dul0ric                                                                      

"Words! Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write."          
                                - Basil Bunting                            
___________________________________________________________




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