Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Episode 1163: No, I Don't Want More Contact Hours

I'd considered attending the SU General Meeting in MS.02 this evening, but seeing as it's still carrying on nearly four hours after it began, I'm quite glad that I exercised my right to not care. The ban on Bacardi has been upheld, which seems a bit pointless anyway, since it's still sold in Costcutter on campus and Tesco off campus. Ethics wins the battle, but capitalism already won the war. Regarding the motion on the agenda about enhancing the quality of education though, I'm not entirely convinced that having a guaranteed minimum number of contact hours translates into enhancing education quality. I quite like having all that free time to read (and think about what I read). Ideally, anyway. Just because it doesn't always work out that way doesn't mean that it's somehow better to increase the number of hours I have in class. Having read Thomas Docherty's book, I'm more inclined to think the desire to have a minimum amount of contact hours as reflecting the same logic that sees a degree in terms of it's delivering value for money. If students here didn't have to pay tuition fees, do you think they really would be terribly bothered by the absence of a minimum number of contact hours? I doubt it. Or at least if they were, it would be for reasons other than wanting to get their money's worth, which I would probably regard as being fine. Not to say that brand of reasoning is completely absent at the moment, but to deny that capitalist logic has anything to do with it at all is being unrealistic.

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