27th June 2011, 02:31 PM
Doug Wrote:Teaching practical skills and theory is the same.
Yes, teaching practical skills will equip you with the tools to do one specific job (albeit very well), but may make the student too specialised to do anything else, hence why I said that an archaeology degree shouldn't just be a production line churning out diggers for the commercial sector. There's no problem with this type of course in itself, but it's unlikely to be particularly attractive for the 95% of archaeology graduates who don't want to work within that particular niche.
Doug Wrote:And right now uni?s teach content and not what to do with that content. So I would put forth teach content that can help a person in their career as unfortunately the world has changed and now that is why you go to uni.
But it must be up to the individual student to decide what they want to do with that content. As I said previously, some may wish to go into commercial archaeology, some will undertake further study to go into academia, and the majority will probably do something outside archaeology. I suppose at the moment most degree courses are heavily weighted towards those who want to pursue an academic path, so there would be scope for re-balancing them by including elements applicable to a commercial career, but I don't think it would be helpful to tip completely to the other extreme and have all degree courses solely designed to produce staff for commercial contractors.
You know Marcus. He once got lost in his own museum