31st August 2012, 01:38 PM
Unitof1 Wrote:rather than expecting people to be trained by someone else at no expense to them and delivered on a plate.
I pay my taxes to educate them just like everybody else. And that education involves subsidised university education.
Interesting that suddenly
no its not a bigger question or if you want to put it another way if you are not going to privide a technical vocational training what the hell do you think you are provideing. As you said these posibly 75 possibly relevant jobs going what have you done to the other two thousand qraduates because its those that you are really teaching and who are not ever likely to compete with you.
That Nick clegg I think did a bit of archaeology skirting
thats not a start its a bloody miserable up its self excuse .
In my world we have accounts, want to show me some from the wonderful fantisy university field unit.
On the practicle side that means that about ninty percent of the university so called archaeology courses should close down and those left have an incredibly big finger to pull out of where they have enjoyed putting it for the last 20 years
Your fired
Fair enough, you think that universities should follow an instrumentalist agenda purely providing technical training- yes, you do pay your taxes and you clearly have an understandable interest in seeing some level of training- the question is, is it the role of a university undergraduate degree course to produced ready-to-roll field technicians - I'd argue not- I don't think that general education in humanities is an 'up itself' excuse, I think it is a pretty key issue. At the end of the day what is the point in doing archaeology if it is not for the wider public; the reason why we even have an archaeological planning system (disfunctional though it may be) is because at the end of the day the public (however they may be defined) think that archaeology is something of value and something worth recording and protecting. On the basis of this it is worth providing archaeological education for more than just a small cadre of commercial field archaeologists. If we purely do archaeology to meet the basic demands of the planning process with no thought of the wider public then what is the point? Presumably, even you must been excited, exhilirated even by archaeology, or why would you do it? Why would you persevere through all the financial challenges and institutional issues, if you didn't have at the end of the day, a basic love of the subject.
I'm not denying for one moment that archaeological training needs improvement, but the question is whether the role of the university is to provide it. There are other ways, training schemes, apprenticeships, placements, post-graduate training that may well be far more effective in providing more tailored on the job training. I also agree that there are ways universities could improve field training- professional placements, gap years etc, but they are not easy to set up, particularly at the moment.
From my perspective one of the key things that people need to become good excavators is experience- lots of time (months) on site, with a good supervisor. I don't think universities are in necessarily the best place to acquire this kind of time and dedication on time. I'm not sure they ever have- has there ever been a time when universities provided this kind of training? Can anyone, even the old contemptibles, hand on heart say they emerged from HE onto a site knowing all they needed to know and not requiring any kind of training?
So UO1, in the spirit of constructive dialogue, what is your recipe for effective field training? In an ideal world, how would a course be structured- how would arrange a 3-year course to provide the kind of training you think is necessary? Indeed, what training do you see as most important? What skills do you think a new archaeology graduate should have, and how should they acquire them. I am genuinely interested, you clearly have extensive experience in the commercial field, where do you see the challenges and how can they be addressed?
cheers
David
(NB: yes I'm sure Nick Clegg did do some archaeology, but i can easily show you politicians of all hues and non-party activists who did archaeology, that's not really the point though is it?).