Mathematics is a bedrock discipline of university teaching and research. If I was looking to start an all-in, I’d almost be tempted to assert that every useful academic discipline has mathematics at its core…but we’ll save that argument for a rainy day.
Regardless of your views on that little provocation, this review by a number of representative bodies of the state of the mathematical sciences in Australia is pretty depressing reading. Pretty much all of science, engineering, and a great deal of commerce, and not a small proportion of the social sciences, depend on mathematics and statistics both for their practice and for continued research and development – and they’re getting more, not less important. As the report notes, the biological and medical sciences are becoming increasingly dependent on sophisticated statistical analyses – in my own faculty, computer simulations are used to analyse the structures of different protein molecules. But that’s the froth. At a more mundane level, the mining boom is dependent on engineers and geologists. Both are intensely mathematical.
But despite the increasing need for mathematicians, and more broadly, students in many disciplines who need an excellent grounding in maths and stats, mathematics and statistics are going backwards in Australian universities. Dedicated departments are shutting down, and maths subjects are being taught by non-mathematicians. Research output is stagnating.
The report notes a number of reasons why mathematics is in such a precarious state – lack of students (despite high demand for them from industry), funding anomalies that lead other departments to teach maths and stats courses rather than have them taught by mathematicians. This might seem like interdepartmental snark, but they have a real point in my view. After seeing the results of students being taught computer programming by random departments other than specialised IT ones, the thought of similar effects in mathematical disciplines is not pretty.
While the report is not politically partisan and looks exclusively at mathematics, I don’t have to do either, and it seems to be symptomatic of a broader problem afflicting Australian universities – the gradual hollowing out of the universities with endless, short-term profitable vocationally-oriented courses and the neglect of core underlying disciplines. With the malign attitude towards funding universities properly by the Howard government, universities have responded by doing the only rational thing and dropped the unfashionable to keep drawing in the courses that attract students by the truckload. It’s by no means the only issue – mathematics has both an image problem and suffers from poor-quality teaching in our high schools – but it seems to me to be a real one.
According to new adviser to Kruddy, Maxine McKew, Rudd thinks “Australia can and should take the lead in educational excellence”. Reviving Australian mathematics, and more broadly ensuring other core disciplines (notably the also-struggling physics) are preserved and expanded, would be a good start.
its a good thing I don’t have a discipline then, isn’t it?
but I think you’ve put the horse before the cart. I should be: maths as a particular representation of logic, logic as core of most useful university disciplines.
I agree with this post Robert. Its a tragedy that will cost Australia long-term. Look at university bookstores and you will find more books on feminism or marxism than on maths. Moreover much of the maths that is taught is computer science – its useful but not the whole story.
Part of the reason for these developmenmts is the dumbing-down of universities via commercialisation. Students seek an easy path though university and universities respond with undemanding units that emphasise psychobabble and ‘studies’ courses not analysis. In the business area many students now do ‘marketing’ or ‘human resource management’ rather than economics and where economics is taught there are pressures to reduce maths requirements to enhance demand.
One curious point is that enrollments in maths are low despite very good career opportunities in teaching and commerce for maths graduates. Another point is that many Asian migrants to Australia don’t follow the trend to sloth – they emphasise maths training and often get the pick of the jobs. Its resident non-Asian Australians who miss out.
“One curious point is that enrollments in maths are low despite very good career opportunities in teaching and commerce for maths graduates.”
Presumably then the shortage of trained mathematics graduates, together with high demand for their skills, will see their salaries rise, students will want to study maths again, and university maths departments will flourish once more.
Or not.
This is probably a fairly common trait amongst departments who are a few levels away from the profit making side. Bio-tech in QLD exploded a few years ago with the promise of making huge profits. 3rd year biology classes were huge with hundreds of students. Meanwhile 3rd year maths classes with 20 students are considered huge!
I am commonly asked by people I meet, “how does your work affect me?” Often it is hard for people to grasp what I tell them. But this is the reason. Like it or not politics is involved and if there isn’t direct profits to be made which the average person can understand, then not a lot of effort will be put into such adventures.
The new students who will form the future of departments like this will be the dedicated few who don’t get burnt out.
The number of academic math positions in Australia has declined dramatically in the last 15 years. It is extremely difficult to obtain an academic math position – apparently 60 people applied for a (Level A?) position at Charles Darwin university in 2004. The intense competition for these positions means that only those who are extremely competitive in the measures that universities use in assessing applications have any chance for a career in academia.
Similarly, there are very few (comparatively) research positions for young mathematicians. Not surprisingly, many work in areas in which they’re wanted and in which they find interesting, eg the finance industry (Steve Edney is an example of a PhD physics person who works in the finance industry). Some might become teachers, but the teaching profession is quite different to the scientific profession, which many mathematicians think themselves part of. Many science trained people have the curse that they want to do work they find interesting and need to find a job which satisfies them in that way.
I have to agree that the careful and rigorous logical thinking skills gained in the study of advanced mathematics is extremely useful in practically all fields of work and that the decline in the study of advanced mathematics by Australian residents may have negative implications for Australia in the next twenty years, say.
Personally speaking, it may mean that many of my friends and I have enhanced career prospects (!) – a silver lining.
This was true 11 years ago at Qld Uni when I was doing 3rd yr mathematics classes.
If education is the main plank of Ruddy’s ‘ BOLD AMBITION’ for our wide brown and the consensus here is that this is a good thing so that we may all learn more about the three ‘ R’s’
1) Reconciliation
2) Republic
3) Rooting. ( Brothel vouchers for pensioners)
Here then is my 2c on how to frame and sell this brilliant democratic-socialist concept. You frame it as a National-security issue. For sustainable autonomy we need to be a reasonably intelligent country instead of one being run by patent morons as it is now. Then you play yr master card.
‘ Men and wopersyns of Ozland. This new education policy for all will lead to inexorable rise in the size and power of the state BUT we now all know that this way lies danger. So along with increased outlays in this area we plan to cut down the overall size of the state sector. I , ‘ K-Rud the Mighty’ have experience sacking lazy fat-cat public servants left, right and center. The requiste cuts may be safely made when the defence dept is finally audited and large slabs of DFAT are obviously suplus to requirements.
Our xtian socialist commonwealth will be a ‘Tony Benn’ style progressive and evolutionary enlightened project that will be inclusive, diverse and networked. This is a bold ambition and one that we want to share.
Yadaa Yadaa etc, etc, blah, blah, blah.
Thank youse for voting Ruddard in O8.
Harry said
I gotta say Harry, as someone who has studied both of them, there are plenty of easier ways through university than those subjects! If you think Marxism doesn’t involve copious amounts of maths, you’re way off the mark (whether you agree with the maths is a different story).
I don’t think the blame lies on any particular faculty/subject (much as I would like to pay out many english and business comms subjects…). I’ve studied many different disciplines at university – many more than you, I should think – and there are rigorous and slack units in every area.
Speaking of maths, got some stats on that Harry?
There is something of a contradiction here in the claim that, a) Maths is at the core of all useful disciplines and b) the decline in Maths is due to a focus on vocationally-oriented courses. Not that it should distract attention from your main argument, but could it be that this contradiction is one of the causes of poor university policy?
Harry,
Brush up on your fixed point theorems, and then try working your way through John Roemer’s “Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory”.(CUP, 1981)
It’s not easy, but the reward will repay the effort.
We are simply turning out an excess of blithering bunnies who all want to ‘make the community more aware’ about the perceived problems of the world and less and less, those with the relevant skills to seriously address those problems. A whopping 40% of school finishers go on to uni and ask yourself why we need to spend more record amounts on tertiary education. We need sensible priorities, not continual pandering to this bloated leftist producer group.
TimT: interesting observation. Replace “vocationally-oriented” with “soft and of sometimes dubious worth” and you might get a bit closer to my personal feelings on the subject.
Uncle Milton
Indeed, Marxism can be an extremely challenging study; an even bigger challenge would be for you to identify any Australian university course that has John Roemer’s tome on its reading lists.
I’d focus on the throwaway remark in the post about the poor quality of secondary maths teaching. It’s true – having had two kids recently go through high school I was astounded at how good some of the English, history and geography texts were and how universally dreadful the maths ones were (culture warriors who claim history isn’t being taught well are mostly talking utter BS). Lots of rote learning and few hints of the way maths can give you insights to change your view of the world. They managed to kill outright any intellectual curiosity in their reader.
Add to this, of course, that articulate and communicative people often become English or history teachers, but numerate and communicative people tend to to have better opportunities elsewhere.
DD, it’s not an either-or.
Every Herald-Sun reader and their dog gets to hear about “our failing schools”. I was just trying to draw attention a problem that gets less attention, and, unlike P-12 education, is primarily a federal responsibility – hollowed-out universities.
With our two children, I’ve done the parent career nights, and I gotta tell you, maths for the sake of maths is not a sexy number, it doesn’t matter which way you invert it, if marketers can’t sell it, mathematics have no chance.
Did you know that the sum of the angles inside an ideal right angle triangle is 270 degrees. How about that.
Mathematics teachers are over represented in those teachers who leave teaching because of ‘failure’. And this occurs despite efforts to retain if possible.
It would seem that mathematics teachers generally (certainly not all by any means) do not communicate as well as teachers of other subjects. They tend to rely too heavily on text books and material written on the BB.
There is too much ‘rote learning’ and too much ‘do another 30 or so for homework’.
But there are no simple answers.
Ahh – fixed point theorems – I remember them fondly. Very powerful.
For some perspectives on what Robert is writing about, this article in the latest Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Society by Ian Roberts, a mathematician of long-standing at Charles Darwin university, is worthwhile reading, although I’m unsure about some of the author’s observations about economics, here is an article by a very prominent Australian mathematical physicist on applying for research grants, here is an article by a mathematician from University of New England on elements of teaching what the author sees as real mathematics as opposed to pseudo-mathematics and here is an article by a mathematician who had an academic career for 8 years and then joined a venture in statistical and mathematical consulting on his impressions on what the mathematics profession can do to improve it’s standing:
I’m a mathematical physicist and I recently applied for one of four positions at a “complex systems” research institute in the US (code for an insitute in the mathematical sciences). There were 300 applicants, so roughly 70 people applied for each position.
In order to maintain a career in my discipline I don’t have to just be prepared to work anywhere in Australia, I have to be prepared to work anywhere on the planet. There aren’t too many other disciplines that have so few positions that you have to continually move to stay employed. I’m not complaining I could move into the finance world and score a more secure job, it’s just a bit ridiculous how little funding is available to the mathematical sciences.
Recently, one of my friends put in a submission to the US congress to try to stop a funding cut to computational complexity theory (a very important area at the cross section of math and computer science which unfortunately sounds very unsexy to most non-math people). The total NSF research budget for this area of math was approximately 4 million dollars and was facing a funding cut. My mate was telling me how his dad laughed about it because to him, an ex-employee of AT&T Bell, this was approximately nothing at all.
mick, heck, I’d reckon a fair whack of the people who go through IT courses don’t understand what NP-completeness is. No, scratch that, I’m not sure they know the difference between a linear and quadratic algorithm.
(Translation for the humanities types: think a politics student who can’t tell Marx from Mill).
On a sphere you can create such triangles easily.
The overall investment needed for an academic career like mick’s is so large that I’m sure that many people just decide that the return on the investment is just too small, and they do other things.
I attended a public school in country NSW until year 11.
Out of all my time there, I did algebra for maybe one week, and maybe a week or so of trigonometry as well (easily forgotten).
The contrast was remarkable when I went to private school in year 11 and 12. There I learnt calculus and integral calculus, had a thorough grounding algebra, induction, geometry (of various types), etc, etc, etc.
On a few occasions, our maths teacher complained about the gap between 4-unit maths (the highest level, obviously) and University maths – where students effectively had to learn catch up because of a gap in the syllabus.
So there is undoubtedly a problem at universities – but the problem probably starts with the high-school syllabus, and the way it is unevenly applied in different years and in different schools!
Robert, it’s “Not Polynomial” right
.
As a physicsish type who works in physics departments I hear that one all the time. Another common question that I get from people who really should know better is, “is factoring NP-complete?”. Normally at that point I throw my hands up and walk away.
TimT – there is a huge problem with mathematics in high schools in this country. The standard of teaching is far too low. Very few physics or math teachers have done much physics or math beyond high school. A big chunk of the problem is the low salaries. Why would a qualified mathematician go work in a school for 40k a year when they can work in industry for 80k? Basically, the only answer is to dramatically increase the pay or incentives for high school teaching. It’s never going to happen though…
Sacha – One of the most depressing things that most people I work with have to experience is the complete lack of job security. A switch to industry would go some way to fixing this but this switch isn’t exactly guaranteed to succeed.
Mick – a switch to industry won’t necessarily mean job security – I’m was on consecutive one-year contracts and now I’m on a two-year contract.
Sacha, I was thinking more in terms of career diversity (ie, you can get more jobs if you have some diversification in your resume) than actual money on the table. One of the problems of the post PhD period is that the longer you stay in academia the less employable outside of academia you become. This isn’t necessarily a function of capability, but rather a function of perception.
I read an interesting article in Nature a year or two ago where someone they surveyed Ameerican postgrads and found that students with a Masters degree found it much easier to get industry work than postdocs. There were a number of reasons for this including pay level issues but mainly because there was an impression in industry that the interests of people with a PhD are too focussed to be of general use. There was also a problem in that many of the people making hiring decisions were less qualified than the candidates, which meant that they didn’t hire people for fear of their own job security…
Patrickg, Marxism and feminism are brain-destroying viruses. Probably the source of your problems. Suggest a treatment of Hayek or Friedman.
Its true Uncle Milton that there are math treatments of Marxist along way before Roemer – M. Morishima’s ‘Marx’s Economics’ is an instance – it came out in the 1970s. He claimed that Marx was the first economist to formulate a macroeconomic model. Ha ha. Ha ha. Ha ha.
Unfortunately I think the Marxian virus got to poor Morishima’s brain as well. Marx was only ever a minor post-Ricardian wind-bag and it is daft to suggest that he first articulated a comprehensive model of the economy. He was a repetitive, boring hack who got his modelling and every major prediction about ‘the laws of motion of capitalism’ wrong. Of course he never used maths in any of his works.
And of course all this is irrelevant to the argument I made. None of the Marxist texts in modern university bookstores have any maths. Just like the feminist garbage they are verbalised, conceptualised, contextualised, deep-fried-ised illogic that serves as light weight feed for those kiddies who think that the term ‘analytical skills’ comes from psychiatry.
“Why would a qualified mathematician go work in a school for 40k a year when they can work in industry for 80k?”
Why would a qualified INSERT PROFESSIONAL DESCRIPTION HERE go work in a school for 40k a year when they can work in industry for 80k?
The solution is to increase teachers’ salaries, sure, but it’s the people with a vocational affinity for teaching you really want to attract with that. I don’t think we need Maths PhDs teaching secondary maths, just people who have done (say) 12 months’ study specialising in Maths teaching.
Sorry Patrickg, I forgot about the numbers connecting superior maths skills to Asian ethnicity. I have only got data for the US but the VCE and HSC rankings in Australia (as well as in related areas) suggest much the same is true in Australia. I posted the links on my blogsite:
http://kalimna.blogspot.com/2006/05/asian-student-performance.html
Maths teaching, that is. No point bolding if you don’t get the emphasis right, is there?
mick – I see and agree with you.
You certainly don’t need a maths PhD to teach high school maths but you do need to know the material, and that requires more than a good solid year learning the relevant material in-dept in addition to learning how to teach it.
I teach at Griffith University. I’m not aware of a single subject in the Faculty of Arts about Marxism or that has a “Marxist textbook”. Perhaps Harry could enlighten me with some actual empirical evidence as to the number of “Marxist textbooks” that are the basis for coursework? As opposed to books on sale that he doesn’t like…
Mark, It was a slip. I meant books (not specifcally texts) on Marx or Marxism. There are many of them but as far as I know few texts. There are no economics texts.
Well, Harry, a lot of university bookshops have poor stock selections full stop. But I doubt that says anything worthwhile about ideology and teaching!
hc
I have been studying for a combined Arts/Science degree recently. My Science so far has been Pure Maths and Pscychology, and my Arts has been History. Allow me to assure you that 99.9% of Arts students, if presented with reading Das Kapital or an assignment calculating whether or not average rate of profit had a tendency to fall, they would burst into tears, run to the Discrimnation Officer, call a meeting of the Queer Aboriginal Transgender Rainbow Coalition and demand that the Student Union pay off their therapy.
You will not find ANY textbooks on Marxist economics in an Australian university book store. The vast majority of the students are thick, thicj, thick, and dull, dull, dull. The lights might be on, but nobody’s home. I have encountered a number of people in their late 20s who are now extremely bitter at how they did not speak up at all the Cultural Studies sludge they were spoon-fed for their entire degree from the mid 1990s onwards.
Mark, I am trying to read where I said it implied a connection between ideology and teaching.
Its not just poor shop selections – its a question of the types of tastes that are encouraged. These shops partly reflect the tastes of undergraduates.
For the most part the low level units taught are based on a commercial ethic not Marxist ideology.
BTW Marx’s ideas still exert an unnatural role in phiolosophy, political science and sociology departments – unnatural because although he is a minor figure he is always being referred to as some kind of counterpoint.
My response on Marxist texts was based on Uncle Milton’s claim regarding the use of maths to analyse Marx’s ideas. I know its been done but the work to me is uninteresting and the sorts of books on Marx for sale to undergraduates certainly don’t adopt this approach.
What are some people complaining about? Now free uni’s gone, it’s the free market now driving people’s choice of what they want to spend on higher education in expectation of what they’ll get out of it out careerwise. I understand law, commerce and marketing degrees have never been so popular and I’m sure we all agree Australia needs more lawyers, business consultants and marketers.
Besides can’t we outsource our maths wrangling to India anyway? That’s what globalistion is all about innit?
As far as I know it is not compulsory to source your reading matter from the University bookshop. Apparently books can also be had in the library, or purchased from other bookstores even.
Harry, when you say mean, mean things about Arts education, you’re, like, twisting a dagger in my heart!!1
Nabs – Development Studies is the hot ticket this year I gather. (Not sure what it is though)
Yes, he’s a meanie all right.
Harry, if Marx is a ‘minor figure’, what ‘major’ figures would you name as having influenced the entire course of 20th century history?
Re maths, personally I think a good case could be made for logic and deduction being at the heart of all high-level analysis in the more discursive Humanities subjects, geometry being at the heart of Visual Arts, arithmetic (via rhythm) at the heart of poetry and maths proper at the heart of music. I can’t see why some subjects have to be exalted at the expense of others, I’m sure.
Unless of course it’s because people are crap at the subjects they’re trashing and think that said subjects must therefore be worthless.
Laura, I have been a strong supporter of Arts faculties over the years. That’s been true even when they have had hard times and my colleagues and I have been on the losing end of big cross-subsidies. Its impossible to imagine a university without a strong arts faculty – and LTU’s is very good. So you have the wrong impression.
Still it discourages me when I go to politics or philosophy meetings and learned professors complain about ‘neoclassical economics’ and contrapose it to ‘Marxian economics’. Its a ridiculous distortion since there were so many in classical economics who were far more interesting figures that Marx – Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Mill, Marshall to pick a few. Moreover of the hundreds of modern critics of capitalism (Arrow, Akerloff, Krugman etc etc) only a handful are Marxists.
Of course I was not suggesting you had to get books from any bookshop. Just taking a very rough index of what undergrads consume as intellectual tucker.
PC, On the possible issue of crap. Actually I came first in year 2 English and 4th in Year 3 spelling.
Joseph Stalin, Chairman Mao and Adolf Hitler all had a big influence on 20th century history but none of their ideas are worth a brass razoo.
I am not a meanie PC – I am lovable. On the other hand both you and Laura should check your own logic. Saying that maths is important says nothing about the importance of poetry, music or other things you mention. Methinks you protest too much – what are you guilty of? How long have you had these feelings of inadequacy?
And I do sincertely apologise to Robert Merkel for inadvertantly creating a diversion from his excellent post on the primary importance of mathematics in all education. He writes really good posts.
The ability to be able to reason logically and abstractly is a fundamental survival skill in the modern world and this is fostered by studying maths.
PC: Despite the throwaway dig in the opening, I’m not trying to “exalt” maths. I’m merely noting that, as you’ve observed, it is vital to a huge range of other academic disciplines, particularly in the sciences, and deserves to be funded accordingly. If that’s what you consider “exalting”, I plead guilty.
Harry, I’m not sure how many undergraduates are rushing the co-op doors to buy books for $50 or $60, whether they’re about Marx or Ricardo or Smith or Friedman.
I could make a defence of the relevance of looking at Marx and Marxism in the context of the history of political ideas (where I’d have thought it needed none) and for that matter in terms of class analysis (where I myself prefer neo-Weberian work but I take care to present all sides of the question – including the conservative Durkheimians) but I think none of it has anything to do with the parlous state of maths in universities. Which is the topic of this thread. So let’s stop talking about side issues, please.
Mark – I responded para by para to criticisms made directly above. Then you take 2 shots at me in relation to side issues and then tell me to stop talking about such side issues.
Read the second last para of mny last post, please. Good night.
Harry, yes, but I think we’re finished with it. I include myself in the criticism for talking about it as well.
Maths is going backwards at Uni for two reasons. A lot of students will avoid anything with Maths in the title like the plague, and of those that do enrol in a course with Maths, many will fail. Put those two facts together with the way unis are funded by the Cth, and it’s no wonder that faculties are trying to ‘get rid of Maths’. (Seriously, if you hang around academic committees doing program restructures, increasing enrolments and reducing failure rates are always the top two goals. I’ve seen assessment plans rejected because ‘too many kids will fail – make it easier’)
The root cause of this is the absolutely dreadful way Math is taught in primary and high school. After arithmetic, the curriculum is always geared towards supporting the next stage of the curriculum, not with giving kids maths skills useful for their everyday lives. (Hence the traditional cycle of questioning ‘Why do we need to know this?’ ‘because it’s on the exam’ ‘But what’s the point in teaching this to us?’ ‘because you won’t understand next semester’s material without knowing it. Now shut up.’)
John Allen Paulos makes a good case in his book ‘innumeracy’ that school maths should focus on estimation and probability, both of which are pretty essential to doing anything in this modern world. Much as I love them, things like conic sections, calculus and complex numbers serve no practical purpose for students and when you think about it, it’s actually quite odd that we are trying to teach this stuff to 15 & 16 year olds en mass.
Robert, I was agreeing with you, and trying to give some examples of the truth of your opening sentence — and indeed your second, though a conversation about (a) what is useful and (b) the general desirableness of a utilitarian approach to knowledge would also be instructive.
I am in fact a huge fan of maths and wish that I were not crap at it, and if it too is going the way (ie down the toilet) of so many other areas of knowledge in universities, overtaken by what is essentially vocational training (ie a utilitarian approach to knowledge; sorry, but there it is), then that makes me very sad.
A little ray of sunshine http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,21099475-1702,00.html
“Much as I love them, things like conic sections, calculus and complex numbers serve no practical purpose for students and when you think about it, it’s actually quite odd that we are trying to teach this stuff to 15 & 16 year olds en mass.”
Wrong! Maths is a total way of thinking and deducing and you need a very broad grounding in its overall logical breadth to achieve that. There are no short cuts, but it needs superb teaching to fire the mathematical imagination. That’s the really hard bit, along with the general lack of discipline nowadays and why many are lost very quickly in the school system.
Here’s the sort of thing Tom van Dulken at Flinders Uni used to set intro maths students as part of their homework. In the following long addition, which works textually, each letter represents a number. What are the numbers so it’s true mathematically?
FORTY
TEN
TEN
—–
SIXTY
You can set that for primary school kids if they know their addition. Tom was a maths teacher out of the box and they should have bottled what he had.
Hmmm, supposed to be plus signs in front of the tens to indicate the addition, but we’re only interested in the value of the letters in the addition.
Letters in sum should be right aligned.
Darryl missed the other reason why Uni courses have to be dumbed down: the insane correlation of funding for universities (and courses)with number of bums on seats, irrespective of the quality of those bums. Try to establish an advanced course that demands excellence from its students, and you will get few enrolments, failure rates will be high (bear in mind that most of the students are working two part-time jobs to survive, haven’t got time for reading or homework, and are still severely underslept), your department’s funding will be cut, and you will be made redundant.
The fact that the students are taught badly at school by non-mathematicians who can’t convey enthusiasm for the ubiquity of maths and its applications does not help this problem in maths or any of the sciences, it must be said. That crosstalk between science and maths is important: it is incredibly frustrating trying to teach undergraduate science to students who are shaky on logarithms. I disagree totally with Darryl on calculus and complex numbers at high school, for any students who want to do science at university. The solution may be to have separate maths/science and non-maths-science streams. But if you want to teach potentially fun applied stuff like mechanics, probability, or even things like compound interest in the latter, some calculus does help! A lot of folks on the street and writing in the media seem to have a huge confusion about relative versus absolute values, current values versus rates of change, etc, and this really shouldn’t be beyond most people if taught properly.
Anyone who is an intellectual inverted snob, please ignore the following rant:
The only solution, as I see it:
0. Actually educating year 12′s up to year 12 level, so that universities could have reasonable pre-requisites and don’t have to repeat year 10 stuff in their first year. From arrival at University, students in maths and sciences basically have 4 years to get to the forefront of current knowledge, which is always advancing. They don’t have time to learn or revise basics.
1. Reverse the idiotic (John) Dawkins Deforms. Let’s give up on having a “university” in every country town. A nation of 20 million can afford to fund and staff about a dozen real universities properly. Of course, these should be bigger than they are at present, with more scope for economies of scale and synergies between staff.
2. Encourage good students to move to the right university for their chosen subject with generous scholarship programs that include full accommodation allowances. A bright enough student from a poor family should never have to worry about how to finance a good degree course in their chosen subject at the best university that accepts them.
3. Accept that investing in proper tertiary education in sensible traditional subjects is investing in the fabric of the nation, not subsidising self-oriented mental bling for kids.
We should stop saddling bright students with ridiculous fees and future debts that force them to work behind bars when they should be discussing or doing homework on the other side of the counter.
Of course, if anyone rich but less able wants to pay full fees, they may
Anyone who thinks that universities and graduates have never done anything for them and theirs should consider where their GP’s, lawyers, engineers, medicines, mobile phones, etc come from. We need politicians with the backbone to tell them that.
By the way: we are very short on Parliamentarians with science and maths degrees. We need more.
4. Dis-accredit universities that prioritise flavour-of-the-month vocational studies (TAFE stuff) over real academic disciplines.
5. Give universities, departments and staff sensible and secure recurrent operating budgets for research and teaching. If there is a performance-related element, make it a bonus related to excellence of outcome, not quantity of intake.
6. Accept that if everybody has something called a “degree”, and that if flavour-of-the-month studies is considered to be as important as physics, chemistry or history, then the whole damn lot are meaningless. Some people are better trained and more skilled in some areas than others, and possession of a qualification should be a reliable indication of that. There is no special “Australian Way Of Knowing” that transcends the standards set by Best Practice Overseas.
We don’t let anyone join our Olympic teams, so why the heck let just anyone claim to have a Maths degree if they’d barely cope with a freshman remedial class at Harvard?
This doesn’t exclude people from Higher Ed. There’s plenty of scope for diplomas and certificates in less academically exacting subjects, but these are not bachelor’s or higher degrees, and should happen in TAFEs, not Unis.
7. Yes, I know. In my dreams.
It’s obviously far better to:
(i) Keep the Nats sweet by keeping funding and people dispersed through far too many regional Unis.
(ii) Keep the students broke and at home with Ma and Pa to prevent them broadening their outlook too far.
(iii) Preserve the myth that higher education is of benefit only to the student, and that a student is a customer who pays a price and receives goods in return, even though this is a travesty of the real educational relationship.
(iv) Play the phony egalitarianism card to make dumbing down palatable. Then play the parochialist “sufficient for Australia’s needs” card.
(v) Contract out all our clever stuff to foreigners on short-term visas. We’ll just dig enough stuff up, shear enough stuff off, and harvest enough wheat to pay for it.
Building a curriculum on the assumption that you’re going to have ‘superb’ maths teachers is just stupid. Why not also assume that these teachers will have have ideal point mass so they can serve as examples in physics?
And since logic has reared its axiomatically perfect head, consider that the fact there are no short cuts does *not* imply that all paths are the same length! The paths we set in primary and secondary school really have one purpose: meeting the expectations of University lecturers (’cause, you know, the point of universal public education is to keep University staff happy…)
Setting a path that instead shows children how the magic of symbols and logic illuminates the world around them… wow! Show kids how what they’re learning relates to *their* world – that’s how you get kids to care about the subject, and you need them to care if you’re going to have any hope of firing the mathemagical imagination.
d
You can do a hell of a lot of practical mechanics and probability without knowing any calculus at all and I’ll buy the idea of teaching calculus off that sort of foundation. But what currently is the *practical* basis for calculus in high school? As for complex numbers, I spent a whole semester of grade 11 learning deMoirve’s theorem, then spent about three weeks, in each of three separate courses in first year uni learning it all over again because most students didn’t get taught it in high school. But note, that was one semester of high school maths taught in three weeks of first year uni, with no obvious loss of content.
And you don’t need calculus to understand it! This is exactly the sort of basics that should be taught in primary school. Less time spent calculating the perimeters of circles and trapezoids, more time spent on the maths aspects of things one reads in the newspapers.
d
Harry
I presume the economics students at your university have to take a couple of quantitative subjects. Do they do proper maths as taught by the maths department (i.e. the same subjects that engineeering students, physis students etc take), or, as is usually the case, the watered down variety as taught by the economics department?
Harry I was only pulling your leg. I don’t know how six lines of comment can be construed as protesting too much.
I don’t see why a lot of abstract maths can’t be taught at a much younger level, actually. A lot of it is pretty simple. I was gobsmacked when I first encountered algebra in, I think, year 10 (and did this for only 2 weeks). Here was something where you had to solve questions like:
a b = c, therefore b = …
a = a, therefore 2 x a = …
What a load of bollocks, I thought! I could have, like, learned this in primary school!
Same with impossible numbers, and logic, and several other fields. A similar rule also holds true for much music and English/Literature and the arts, I’d say; currently education seems very much geared towards making sure nobody falls behind rather than that the brighter kids get ahead. I don’t think it would mean that much stress for little kids; you could spread out the various disciplines over a number of years and save them a lot of stress during the HSC period (years 11 and 12).
Worse than this I think is that if they go into industry they could easily be earning considerably more in about 5 years time than they ever be able to earn in teaching even should they become principal.
We continue to underestimate the gravity of the crisis of mathematical, and, more generally, scientific education. Western civilization has reached the stage of development (and “division of labor”) when, indeed, 95% percent of population do not know, AND DO NOT HAVE ANY NEED TO KNOW, the working of 95% of everyday technology around them. iPod or a mobile phone use an extremely sophisticated mathematics – but why should a consumer care? I am a mathematician and I do not want to lie to my students and their parents: yes, it is possible to live long and happy life without knowing mathematics. Or physics. Or chemistry. Or biology – add to this list any discipline of your choice. These are fruits of the ever increasing sophistication of division of labor.
In this situation, the key problem is how to teach science and mathematics to 5% of population needed for supporting and developing the mathematics-intensive technology without bothering the remaining 95% with the boring stuff. In the economic set-up of “postindustrial age”, mathematics teaching inevitably means selection. But, with declining numbers of students studying mathematics, and with declining standards at earlier stages of education, very soon we will not have anyone around to select from.
I spent 30 years of my life teaching mathematics. And I do not know an easy answer to the problem — because it is not just a problem, it is one of the breaking points in the development of Western civilization, perhaps comparable with the strife of early industrialization.
I have to admit that, when writing this comment, I did not even care to check to which particular country the original post referred to — it appears that the same is happening all over the West. Ah, yes, Australia. Nice wine, I have to admit.
“Show kids how what they’re learning relates to *their* world – that’s how you get kids to care about the subject,”
Utter piffle. If we always tailor learning to the ‘child’s world’ how on earth will they come to learn about the adult world. This is patronising Dreamtime rubbish. I’m not saying we don’t need to come down to kids levels but we have to expect them to jump ever higher bars and push the bounds. That’s precisely the trouble with maths and sciences nowadays. Too many kids lost in Mem Fox storytime and leftist Dreamtimes. Simply put, adults are not here to go into some lovely kiddy story every time they want something sweet off the shelf at the supermarket. It’s ‘No’ and ‘eat yer veges’ and all will be revealed young feller.
It starts in JP school where you have to know your numbers and that’s drilling mental arithmetic and times tables. That’s too fascist for the wet curricula Dreamtimers these days and aint it showing. It’s the same story with phonemic literacy. The trouble is we have the blind generations leading the blind nowadays.
Don’t get me started on the kinds of tradesmen (what bloody few there are)the blind generation of tradesmen are turning out these days. God help you all when we old bastards kick off and they start running the show.
One of my comments was lost in moderation (it had some links to articles on the topic of this post).
A few things: I suspect that universities have removed a lot of high school pre-requisites from their courses with the result that universities are now having to put on huge classes for high school material for people who didn’t do what previously were pre-requisites. I’m pretty sure that’s happening at Qld uni for example. Ostensibly, not having pre-requisites means that kids in Yr 10 don’t need to choose Yr 11 and 12 subjects with a view to potential uni courses and so promotes flexibility for the kids, but it means that university resources have to be devoted to educating kids in what they would have previously known.
I agree that it can seem difficult to see any connection between, say, Yr 10 geometry and its use in the world, however, as with a lot of schooling, it’s not necessarily only about the specific knowledge gained, but also about educating kids into specific ways of thinking – in this case, careful logical thinking and problem solving, which is useful in many areas.
This is a very pertinent comment.
True and saddening, Robert.
According to a world-class researcher (in topology) in Melbourne: Billiton has estimated that its group of mathematical scientists have saved the company several hundreds of millions of dollars in costs in a single year.
As a PhD student in applied maths, I’m looking forward to receiving a well-paying and decent job, but the gap in maths skills in future generations is a worry.
And despite the nickname, I’m not a communist.
âShow kids how what theyâre learning relates to *their* world – thatâs how you get kids to care about the subject,â?
I’ve phrased a couple of things a bit too strongly, including this bit. When I say ‘their world’ I mean ‘the world around them’. And I’m guilty of ignoring the distinction between high school and primary school a bit too much. But these maths problems have to be fixed in primary school. No-one enrols in Maths at Uni unless they like it, and the opportunity to show kids the magic of maths is in primary school. Once they’re in high school, they’ve already decided it’s a waste of time.
Whilst this
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,21103570-1246,00.html?from=public_rss
is one of the downsides of the new Dreamtime logic in bringing up kids and occasionally Dreamtimers like Media Mike sometimes wring their hands appropriately over it, the Dreamtime fuzzy approach does have its upside for we critics.
Quite some years ago I decided the new Dreamtime, fuzzy logic, two plus two equals four when you feel like it approach of Gen X,Y and Zeeeee, does have its pluses. No more would I worry if said generation was happy to undercharge me so regularly or give me discount from the advertised or RR prices on display. Fine if that’s what your calculator or fuzzy little mind works out me young china. Of course if you’re overcharging me, I know mentally in an instant and can correct the inequality of it all. How many times as a smoker, did I watch The Gen?ers grapple with a packet of tobacco plus 1 or (God forbid) 2, 50c packets of TallyHos and give me some humungous discounts. Just last month I picked up $60 worth of steel and a $275 steel shed door from a large national supplier and would you believe it, I’m such a nice customer, the door is free, according to the staements. Thanks young feller. Every little bit helps in business these days.
In the good old days you could ring the rep and order stuff over the phone. Not anymore with fuzzy Gen?ers. Make sure you’ve got it on a printed faxed order or else. Like the $4000 worth of TERMITE TREATED framing for the last addition. Yep, the windows were in, the tiles on and the bricks up in aflash before the mistake was noticed. On to Bob the State Manager and (sigh!)yep O it’s ‘our’ fault picking the plain stuff, so he gets some manual on-site chemical treatment and agrees to shell out the $2000 worth of Sentinel treatment the customer was having installed anyway. That lot of timber was pretty much a freebie, if it didn’t actually cost Bob’s mob real money. Ah fuzzy logic and the Dreamtime, aint it grand?
Say what?
Observa, you’re offensive, dude.
Engel, don’t assume that you will “receive” a job. You have to win one, and many people find it harder than they think it will be.
Observa, you’re making even less sense than usual. *Where* is it that they are not teaching arithmetic anymore?
There is a problem with the level of Maths knowledge students (whether at primary/secondary school, or at University) have. The scariest thing I have seen is a fellow student in a uni Econ 101 unit not knowing how to group like terms to complete the equation to find the variable. Until maths is considered compulsory study in high schools, like English, the current decline of maths will continue.
As an aside, I think that Maths departments at Universities, and maths teachers in schools need to come up with inventive ways to excite students about how “sexy” maths is. When I was at high school, the school and the local university worked together so “talented” students could attend Uni maths classes – where you were able to study beyond the algebra/calculas/trig that was dished out in the high school class room, to trying out informal and formal logic/discrete maths/partial DE’s etc. It helped though that the uni maths lecturers who were involved in this were very personable and enjoyed showing high school students other experiences of maths that you don’t get to see in the high school class room.
Yes Observa! When *I* was a kid, it was all quantum physics and hard-core trig, not like this namby-pamby, milquetoast, wishy-washy, pants-too-low/socks-not-high-enough, ipod-wearing, low GI, Britney Hilton, Bluetooth kids of today!
Hah! They wouldn’t even *know* what a triangle is if it wasn’t a window to clearly LSD-inspired trips on so-called “Play” school.
When I was a kid, dagnabbit, school wasn’t for play! It’s was for book-learnin’ and a good caning!! Damnit, why’d they have to change Rote Learning??? Saying something over and over again until everyone believes you works fine! Just ask John Howard! But noooo-oooooo, they have stupid, girly soft commie ideas like “curriculum”. Fie, I say, FIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!
Simon Singh wrote a book a few years ago about some dude who spent about ten years of his high powered maths profession proving “the sum of the cubes of a right angle triangle do not equal”. We know that the sum of the squares do and this is one fundamental rule.
Having discarded the book after 50 pages, I came to the a number of conclusions, of which these two seemed the most important:
1. Maths tales do not make great reading
2. Maths is unique in that it IS an exact science. Thereoms are based on accurate and complete proofing of a hypothesis, approximations are not accepted.
So in this age of rapid data transfer, who wants to be a maths guru dedicating 10 years of his life to something we quite possibly know by intuition. Maths is not what it use to be, it is heavily reliant on digital computers which by their design are approximations of pure analog systems (quantisation errors).
In response to the maths teaching issue, the public teaching system does not follow classical economic theory, re supply and demand. instead of paying more to entice mathmatics to teaching, it dumbs down to broaden the pool of teaching resources and more reliant on text. Sad but true
tic toc, this sounds a bit strange. Pure mathematics is exact, although it’s a human activity and so subject to human error.
Not many people want to spend 7 years attempting to solve very difficult problems such as Fermat’s. Pure mathematics is not heavily reliant on digital computers – although computers may be used. Notwithstanding this, computers might be used to find data to formulate conjectures or to sometimes prove things (eg the four colour theorem).
A lot of the creative side of mathematics is not in calculation, which would be enhanced by ever-faster computers, but in “stretching one’s brain”.
Uncle Milton,
Half the students do maths via the maths department and half in house. I agree that mathematicians have something specific to offer (in teaching maths to non-maths majors) but who teaches what – particularly core service courses in quant – determines where the money goes so politics regrettably comes into it. This is impossible to change while people feel their necks are on the line.
But at least all students do a basic quant and a basic stats unit. Its just so important in economics for students not to have ‘math phobia’. Employers really want people with math skills who can reason abstractly, who can intuit the idea of optimising at the margin and be able to think geometrically using graphs.
Many moons ago when I first studied economics at Macquarie all economics students did first-year Algebra and Calculus as well as an economics statistics unit. The maths units were taught by the maths department.
By the way at that time every student enrolled at Macquarie did an introductory statistics unit.
Its a reactionary trait to talk about the good old days. But with respect to quant I think things have regressed. I am told that in Melbourne econometrics students don’t learn matrix algebra but write out sets of normal equations long hand for simplicity. After all you have computer packages to estimate regressions so why spend time learning detailed theory!
Laura,
I read every syllable you write.
“Observa, you’re offensive, dude.”
Mustn’t offend anyone these days with standards must we PC?
And patrickg, I’d back my parent’s generation to be able to add up the price of a loaf of bread, the milk and paper, as well as pen an articulate, grammatical letter over the latest offering any day. Have you been out shopping these days? The wife is a JP teacher so I know a bit about what goes on with early learning. Jeebus some of the parent’s attitudes make your head spin. No wonder their sprogs are so fat and useless with ADD. IMO and many others, Mem Fox was a middle class twit who is personally responsible for many SA kids being functionally illiterate. You soggy leftys always pander to the lowest common denominator and it shows in the outcomes.
It is the hubris of every generation to think they are the last bulwark of standards.
I thought we were more indulgent than pandering to you obby, but you’re welcome.
As so often, Obs, you have completely missed the point. Mem Fox is old enough and ferocious enough to look after herself. As a matter of fact I agree with you completely about phonemes, and think that ‘whole language’ or whatever the hell it’s called is a load of old cobblers that has produced a generation of careless, unskilled readers.
*ducks for cover in all directions*
No, it was your derogatory, ignorant, throwaway reference to Aborginal spirituality, used as a term of abuse, that offended me. And many other people, I’m sure.
No disingenuous pleading of innocence, either, please; you knew exactly what you were doing, and you were doing it on purpose.
I think that this situation will lead to the same thing that is happening in medical. You will import talented student from other countries (Russia? India?) by payng them lot of money…
zerocold
It’s called ‘trolling’, and we (including me) shouldn’t encourage him by responding.
d
True. My bad.
Harry Clarke says:
“Saying that maths is important says nothing about the importance of poetry, music or other things you mention.”
Harry, having myself done some of the film, poetry and novel studies and critiques at university, I must say it is utter crap. It belongs in High School English and possibly TAFE but there is no justification for this unfructuous nonsense at university level.
It is a damning fact that LP’s two literary figures- Laura and Pavlov’s Cat- are Freud pushers even though Freud hasn’t been taken seriously in psychology or psychiatry for 30-40 years. I think this indicates as well as anything else what a diseased and reactionary research program these people are foisting upon students.
These types of academics frauds must be purged from our universities and the money invested in more constructive endeavours.
Stay on topic, steve, please.
I appreciate your exasperation, Mark, and believe me, I share it, particularly as Mr Munn has already launched his latest hate campaign against Laura and me, by name and with links, and equally off-topic, at Catallaxy. Where, sensibly, none of them gave a rat’s fleabitten bottom.
But could I just very briefly point out, for the benefit of any LPers who may not have picked this up already, that Steve’s “facts” are actually just opinions, and that psychoanalysis is quite a distinct activity from both psychology and psychiatry — which are in their turn separate disciplines that are at each other’s throats, united only in their dislike of psychoanalysis?
Ta.
Also, it is not Maths. (Relevance.)
I think I am on topic, Mark.
Purge the bloated fat within the universities and put it into constructive areas including mathematics.
Mathematics will serve us much better than humanities academics who embarrass themselves and their institution by teaching such nonsense as “the history of animals in English literature”.
Er, Pavlov’s Cat, Jason picked up and linked to my post on the Freudian posts LP ran.
I don’t hate anyone by the way. I likewise think Paris Hilton is frivilous but I don’t hate her.
The pool of money available for eduucation is limited and must be used wisely. I support both highly technical skills areas like science and technology in universities. And also those subjects that may lead to a more enlightened underestanding of ourselves in the social sciences and humanities. But I am cross about the frivolous puffery that I have seen for myself emanating from literary time wasters.
Oops- Paris is frivolous not frivilous. Sorry.
The thread is about teaching maths, steve.
TicToc
what on earth are you talking about? Singh’s book on Fermat’s Last Theorem was an international bestseller and has spawned a whole industry of such books – the latest one being on the Riemann Hypothesis. Singh also went on to write a book on the mathematics of cryptography which was also quite popular.
“it was your derogatory, ignorant, throwaway reference to Aborginal spirituality, used as a term of abuse, that offended me. And many other people, I’m sure.”
The Dreamtimeers for me PC, are the soggy, left, middle class twits who want to treat aboriginals as their pet, spiritual, time-warp poodles for posterity. I have no time for them and their sitdown, guilt trip money, that has become aboriginal Australia’s worst nightmare. The only spirituality that has led to is what comes out of a bottle or a petrol can. Aboriginals like all of us, need the education and total integration into a competitive, modern world. They need more maths and science no less than white kids do.
That’s quite enough, people.
If you can’t stick to the topic I’ll start using my godlike powers as a member of the LP Borg.
AndyC
What have you got against regional universities, such as CSU, SCU or UNE?
Robert Merkel:
Mathematics.
Physics.
Anatomy & Physiology,
Languages (especially Asian ones)
Yes, it certainly does sound like The Clever Country.
Everyone:
Oops, sorry folks ….
…. and Geography too.
Mark Hill asked:
“What have you got against regional universities, such as CSU, SCU or UNE? “
Nothing personally, but many of them are too small to be all-round, world-class players in the serious academic subjects. And nothing calling itself a “university” should aim to be anything less than that. If we were to reverse Dawkins, they’d be merged into the bigger universities or demoted. It’s logistically easier and cheaper to have your few big institutions near the majority of your workers, students, service engineers and other contractors, etc, so the big city institutions would be more likely to survive. And yes, being single campus rather than multi-campus does cut down on a lot of administrative duplication and time wasted in intercampus travel, as well as facilitating the widest range of intra-campus contacts.
Andy c
This is absolutely vital. An academic friend told me (and my research so far does not contradict her) that none of the Dawkins Universities has even one Chair or even separate departments for Mathematics, the Physical Sciences, History or Philosophy. Very few, if any, offers even modern languages, let alone Classics or Oriental Studies!
How on earth can these places be described as “universities” with their academics being paid on the same scale as those at Sydney, Melbourne, or the ANU? Instead they offer degrees in “Surfing!” Often a UAI of 60 will earn you a three year tax-payer funded place, when a UAI of 60 is solid evidence of functional illiteracy and/or being a few sanwiches short of the picnic.
glen
I would suggest that Logic is only a small part of the processing and procedural tools of mathematics. It might well be the sine qua non, but not much more. Logic is actually not Mathematics. Maths is basically the discipline of discovering immutable patterns. More than any other intellectual pursuit, Maths energizes our highest complex reasoning synapses: The primary cognitive ability required is visuo-spatial rather than procedural memory.
Logic is taught formally in Discrete Maths, which is typically a first year, though sometimes a second year, unit. Formal Logic, Induction, and Proofs take up about 2/3 of the course; the rest with Number Theory. Some unis require all Maths majors to take Discrete Maths, but not all. I cannot imagine that any Computer Science major (as opposed to IT, which is really just plumbing using a keyboard) not including Discrete Maths as a compulsory unit.
Of course, Logic and Proofs are integrated throughout all other Maths subjects, but it helps a lot if you can take Discrete Maths in First Year; it has such powerful spill-over effects to all your other subjects whether Science, Humanities, Economics, Politics, History, etc.
The question as to whether or not mathematics courses should always be taught by the maths department is an interesting one. I am an economist by trade and training. However, as an undergraduate, I also studied mathematics. Unless things have changed since I was an undergraduate, there are two main problems with the courses offered by the maths department from the perspective of economics students. First, the vast majority of the examples come from the natural science disciplines. Second, some topics that are used extensively in economics get very little, if any, coverage in the courses offered by the maths department. These include non-linear programming (using Lagrangean techniques), optimal control theory (using Hamiltonian techniques and Pontryagin’s maximum principle) and dynamic programming (using Bellman equations).
It is understandable that maths departments bias their courses towards those that are most useful for students of the natural sciences, since these probably account for most of their students. However, given this, it is perhaps not so surprising that economics departments (and quite possibly some departments in the other social sciences) offer their own mathematics courses. These are just general impressions and I may be wrong. I certainly think mathematics is an interesting subject that is worth studying in its own right, as well as for its practical value in terms of applications to other disciplines.
It is worth noting that mathematics seems to have become quite sexy in recent times. For example, mathematical concepts and mathematicians have been portrayed in a number of films, including Sneakers, Pi, Good Will Hunting, A Beautiful Mind and Enigma, as well as the television series Numbers.
Everyone:
And another one for my Clever(?) Country list of outsourced/downsized Chairs and vanished Faculties:
Philosophy
….. and they have the cheek to call these places “universities”! Now what was all that about American mail-order PhDs? At the very least, any place that purports to call itself a university in Australia should have at least one Chair and 3 or 4 students in each of certain specified fields (including those I have listed above) ….. and if they can’t handle something as simple as that, downgrade their status to what it really is: Degree-Mill ….. and treat it like any other retail business.
John Greenfield:
What happens when Australian take their degrees overseas? Away from Mathematics for the moment – one example that sticks in my mind is a bright young Australian who studied Chinese in school and university, where everything was in Simplified Characters, then hit a brick wall when he went to a prestigeous university in the E.U. where it was assumed that everyone who had studied Chinese at all would have studied both Traditional Characters and Simplified ones – in going there, he became effectively semi-literate overnight ……. does the similar thing happen now to Australians going out into the big bad world with their Mathematics qualifications?
Different disciplines have different emphases – it would be possible for mathematics and economics depts to get together to design a mathematically rigorous subject on mathematics used in economics.
This whole ‘world-class’ fixation we’ve got with universities is counter-productive. If Australia totally restructured higher ed to try and produce *one* ‘all-round world-class’ university we probably couldn’t do it, certainly not in one generation. We haven’t got the population and we haven’t got the money. (and ‘what do you do with the rest of the students’ is an unanswered part of the hypothetical)
There’s an interesting submission from Griffith Uni in response to the ‘Crossroads’ document from a few years ago available at http://www.gu.edu.au/vc/crossroads/pdf/paper_1.pdf which looks at the ‘world-class’ question and has some neat comparisons with leading US universities and some very insightful observations.
Rather than chasing some sort of institutional league table, Australia needs an world-class higher education *system*, that can meet the future needs of the nation.
d
Yes I agree Darryl. Meeting the future needs of the nation is what the smaller and newer universities and outlier campuses are attempting to do (the sensible ones, at least.) The regional campus where I teach produces teachers, nurses and social workers as well as business graduates, all of whom are rapidly absorbed into the workforce in their region, obviating the need for students to live away from home to study and keeping people in the regional area long term. Academic achievement is not stratospheric but it is certainly more than adequate and the university provides a range of social and financial benefits to the local area.
Back to mathematics – by the time I did my honours mathematics degree in 1997 at Qld Uni a number of honours subjects had been being offered only every second year, and sometimes they ended up not being offered at all. The number of honours subjects started to decline as the number of staff able to teach them declined.
A lot of this is of course because core funding for departments comes from EFTSU allocations on the basis of student enrolments in subjects and majors. UQ Vice-Chancellor John Hay has been completely dismissive of arguments that the University has an obligation to teach pure maths and theoretical physics (and classics and philosophy for that matter). Let the academics concerned perform well in the quasi-market competition for students, or let them take redundancies.
The irony is apparently lost on right wing educational crusaders such as Rafe Champion:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=2448
Darryl and Laura: your lack of interest in Australia’s adhering to global best practice is touchingly and cutely parochial, but I beg to differ. Probably because I am a scientist, and in scientific research, as in mathematics, you are either doing something that is new, worldwide, or you are not. There is no point in being comfortably 20 years behind the pack pursuing some sort of Special Australian Science. If you only research at that level, and teach to that level, then you are cutting the country out of any ability to participate in international collaboration, to advance knowledge globally, or to maintain local ownership of innovations. Having said which, our godforsaken pollies and industrialists are likely to fumble any ball passed to them by basic researchers on that front.
The fact that our standards can be a little shaky is seen in the way that an Australian science PhD who seriously wants to compete for one of the almost non-existent Australian academic posts is far more likely to stand a chance if they’ve done at least one postdoctoral contract overseas, demonstrating that their PhD actually means something outside Australia. This should not be necessary.
Australia is not more than usually intellectually inept for a developed country. We have the bright people, just not enough of an accessible high-quality education system for them, or after that, the right jobs for them at the right level. A population of 20 million is not “too small” for “one all-round world-class university” when you look at countries such as Sweden (8.5 million) which have much more rigorous science and maths teaching, better funded science labs and career structures for scientists, and excellent universities with very strong scientific traditions such as Stockholm and Uppsala. The “too small” furphy is typical cultural-cringey crap, and it is time that Australia grew out of that attitude.
We certainly have the wealth, or would have if we didn’t waste it on useless second-hand American tanks, etc, and if we actually added value in Australia to the stuff that we let foreign-owned companies dig up and ship out. And, of course, if the Powers That Be weren’t just sitting on a huge surplus to be pissed away come pork-barrelling time. This is supposed to be one of the wealthiest countries on the planet per capita, and it’s about time we acted like it.
If we actually bothered to invest in universities properly, we could fund about a dozen, pro rata continental Europe, like I said above. Don’t bother comparing with the UK, because it is also a country run by idiots, and copied the Dawkins Mistake in the Thatcher years. Similarly, don’t bother comparing with the US, which has a huge range of institutions masquerading under the title “University” from the Great Private to the Great Public to the Fundamentalist Nuthouses to the Mail-Order Shops for Meaningless Pieces of Paper. Why on Earth should we follow suit? Just because most of the Anglo world has gone mad, doesn’t mean we have to join in.
You can have as many lower-budget institutions teaching regional-interest and vocational courses as you like, but they are TAFEs or Colleges or Institutes, not “Universities”, and a qualification that is not evidence of advanced skills that are transferable overseas is not a “degree” but a diploma or certificate. So there are still plenty of places for students to go.
The idea of lumping all these diverse institutions together as “universities” is a lovely example of bipartisan left-right agreement to trash national infrastructure, the left because of blind adherence to levelling-down pseudo-egalitarianism, the right because of the potential for destroying the critically-thinking intelligentsia.
“Meeting the future needs of the nation” bloody well ought to include “making sure that the scientific and technological potential of the nation’s people is realised to the full, in Australia, thus maintaining our nation’s place at the forefront of new developments”.
Funny how we NEVER hear the argument that Australia can’t be expected to win many medals in the Olympics because we are “too small” and “too poor”, isn’t it?
Well, they’re not paid the same and you can’t be paying any attention at all if you think they are. A Lecturer E (Professor) at USQ has a base salary of $4357 per fortnight, the same position at Sydney pays $5046.
And I really don’t get why a one year diploma in sports management specializing in the surfing industry is sooooo awful (that’s the Southern Cross ‘degree’ I assume you’re talking about), unless it’s purely and simply the snob factor. If you can market a course in such a way that it attracts a cohort who might not otherwise have looked at tertiary education, then you have an obligation to do it.
The report actually puts a lot of blame on the funding arrangements that give more funding to laboratory based courses such as engineering. Apparently that provides an incentive for engineering to run its own math courses these days, depriving the maths departments of funding and students and sparking the decline that’s caused this complaint.
Personally, I’m sceptical of these claims for special treatment from academic departments. In this case, the complaint is that the specialist math departments are declining. To adduce support for their case, though, they cite the complete range of technology disciplines, which is misleading.
There are problems with some technology disciplines, but they’re not caused by a decline in specialist math departments.
Settle down Andyc. You’re not suggesting teachers, nurses and social workers ought to be trained at a TAFE college are you?
I’m not suggesting that Australian researchers shouldn’t aim to be the best in the world, and maybe you’re even right in saying that its all-or-nothing for mathematics reserachers, I wouldn’t know about that. But I am saying that there is room for many more kinds of educational aim in Australian universities. Additionally. Which your slam at less prestigious institutions seemed to overlook.
In my experience the plaint that degrees from unfancy Australian universities are looked down upon elsewhere is pretty much self-pitying nonsense. It’s what you publish independently and do after your degree that matters, at least among people with any sense. This is in the humanities, I admit.
Best get back to writing my worlds’ best practice ground breaking article for a book from a global publisher now.
Going back to Darryl’s and Laura’s earlier points and this supplementary one, I’ve taught both at the sandstone UQ St Lucia campus and at UQ Ipswich and at leafy Nathan and Griffith Logan.
The latter two (newish – late 90s) campuses attract a stack of students who would otherwise have never been exposed to university education.
Frankly, their enthusiasm is contagious and generally they’re a lot more fun to teach than rows of Arts/Law students at “prestigious” universities. And a lot more intellectually curious and questioning in many instances.
Andyc, I tend to agree with your assessment of the possibility of Australian Science PhDs to get an Australian postdoc. I also agree that it’d be great if there was one really top-notch high powered Australian university or campus where really world-class mathematics and/or physical sciences was done. At the moment, Australian mathematics academics are sparsely distributed. If possible, have a really top-notch campus; whether an Australian institution or a campus of an overseas institution. Why is it that many of the absolute top Australian math students go to the US?
From Mark’s comment, It sounds as if UQ has dealt itself out of the pure mathematics game.
I think it’s hanging on, Sacha, just, but the comments from Hay were a response to criticism from an OECD education expert who pointed to UQ as an example of the evisceration of non-applied disciplines.
In terms of the general question, though, aren’t we better off having concentrations of research only academics who do only doctoral teaching if we want to be “the best”? That’s essentially what happens in the US where undergrad teaching at the top doctoral universities is farmed out to TAs. However, there are pretty strong arguments against this model too.
And your patronising tone and skill in the construction of strawman arguments certainly ranks with best practice for academic staff, at least by parochial Australian standards of condescension. To say nothing of your impressive ability to confuse your personal achievements with the reputation of the organisation you work for.
This may come as an uncomfortable shock, but a department of scientists doing ‘new’ research does not make the department ‘world-class’.
Now for something (hopefully) constructive: Since you know something about these Swedish institutions, can you point me towards more information about how Higher Ed works in Sweden? On the face of it, if you are correct about the ‘world-classiness’ of their institutions, it’s an interesting counter-example, and I wonder where their trade-offs are.
d
A colleague of mine, Darryl, spent a semester teaching in Norway, and her take was that the undergrad degrees were taught very much on the German model – ie huge classes, no assessment other than exams, distant profs who have zero contact with their students and think it’s highly offensive if students say anything at all to them.
Dunno about Sweden.
That’s one of the big questions in this, isn’t it Mark? I don’t know what’s better – I think that I want a really top-notch math dept as the best researchers are just too spread out at the moment. This would slightly diminish the research performance of most campuses on average, but that might not matter very much to most undergrad students as most math subjects can be taught by people who aren’t the very best researchers, ie it’s not necessary to be the very best researcher to teach most of the subjects.
Tony, the trouble is that the mathematics content of those courses is also suffering.
While I don’t want to fall in to the trap of complaining how the students of today get it soft, the theory content of IT courses has been trending consistently down in the last decade.
Further more, research collaboration with real mathematicians is terribly useful, and if we don’t have maths departments we don’t get it.
Mark
I would be interested in hearing your views on assessment. At my uni. History is assessed basically between 0 and 40% tops for final exams, Maths around 70% for the final exam with 10-30% in quizzes.
One of the History big-wigs told me they are seriously considering increasing the final exam weight as internet plagiarizing was so rife.
I must say I have always thought 3 hour finals were a much better way to sort the sheep from the goats. A friend of mine who went to Oxford says that Oxofrd still has its 3 hour final unseen exams for 8 courses at the very end of the 3 year degree!
His take is that Oxford’s assessment system is only educationally worthwhile if all the students are highly able; it is much less so with either a broader ability cohort or a significantly less able cohort.
Now, none of our unis has anything like Oxford’s concentration of highly able students. What do you think of my friend’s argument?
Robert, I think that’s a simplistic claim and plays into the agenda of the maths departments. The service courses for engineering typically are two year courses and standard. They’re not at the leading edge of mathematics research. In any case, engineering does a fine job of third and fourth years, which are mostly forms of applied maths.
IT courses have descended into garbage precisely because of claims for special status by IT departments, which saw them lobby that there was a big skill shortage and seeking concessions to greatly expand their offerings to cater to overseas students. As we all know, that descended into garbage 9-month “Masters” degrees.
Just as those IT departments should have been put back in their box, so the claims of math departments for special treatment should be examined carefully. The report is a lobbying exercise, not a rigorous study.
Assessment is very much horses for courses, John. I prefer a mix because different skills are being assessed – research skills for instance are not really tested in exams. Or presentation skills. Exams do test the ability to perform under pressure, and recollection, but not much of anything else, depending on how they’re written. Australian universities are also under an obligation to inculcate skills other than pedagogical outcomes and many universities now tie assessment explicitly to outcomes which are designed to make graduates more employable, as indeed they’re required to do by the federal government.
In general, designing assessment is a complex business worth taking trouble over – it should also have regard to the nature of the students as well as the pedagogical aims.
The big danger with 100% end of semester exams is that they are too narrow in what they assess and in the skills they impart.
Mark
Yes, I suppose I agree with you. Except even a 3,000 word Essay does not allow space for any decent discussion. I have sometimes countered to critics of 3 hour finals that in order to be able to present four 6 page long Distinction level essays, you would have had to completed quite a bit of research, know the chronology and historiographical debates very well, and be a dab-hand with quick assessments of the rhetorical demands of the questions. Of course, I imagine that the quality of scripts for those students who end up with Passes must make for dispiriting reading by the teachers.
I was aghast last semester when I did not do as well as I had expected in one course. I asked the lecturer, what happened? While my papers and exam all scored well, I only got 10/20 for tutes becuase I did not attend enough of them! Attendance marks! At university!!?
Good grief.
Tony, I’ve seen the results of non-IT departments teaching programming. I’m prepared to give the maths departments a sympathetic ear if they claim that non-mathematicians teaching maths drops the standards.
You have a point about rubbish IT degrees, but that’s a story for another day (and one I have to be a little bit careful commenting on…)
Robert, I’ve found many non-math textbooks I’ve looked at that use math a bit dispiriting – there’s often a lot of discussion about how to use the math and little discussion of why it works, ie treating it like a black box that somehow works. This doesn’t aid understanding.
Sorry, been a while since I caught up on this thread.
AndyC, the Australian sandstone Unis and ANU are actually pretty highly rated on an international scale. Most of them outstrip almost anything on the European continent. They aren’t in the same league as the big US unis or Oxbridge but they do very well for the money that they have.
Sacha and Mark, I think John Hay has the opinion that physics and math etc can actually compete pretty well for money and students against the other departments if they do it right. Theoretical physics at UQ is renowned around the world for being pretty snazzy. This is partly a result of UQ physics being extremely well managed.
Mark
I think your point and that of UQ about don’t blame us, blame “market forces” is disingenuous. There is nothing offending the market by a university marketing its “product” as, for example, a Bachelor Arts that has a core component that must include x number of subjects from each of humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences.
Every top college in the U.S. has a “breadth” and “depth” requirement, the most laudable being the University of Chicago.
The University has a fantastic degree called Bachelor of Liberal Studies. it is four years long. Students must complete one full Arts major, one full Science major, four semesters of a foreign language, one semester of Maths (or Statistics) and cross-displinary Arts subject
Robert, I agree non IT departments are incompetent in teaching programming, but that’s different from the case with maths.
Engineering faculty are almost always formally trained in maths and additionally well trained in their own math-like disciplines, so they’re qualified to teach the maths courses undergraduate engineers need.
In teaching programming, on the other hand, lecturers in non CS department generally have no formal training and, more importantly, no experience in serious software development. There should be much more attention paid to this, by the way.
Anyway …
Sacha, you might appreciate Tom Sargent’s advice to graduate Economics students on what mathematics courses they should take!!! It can be found here:
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ts43/ .
Thanks Damien – just had a look – it’d be good for students to take some rigorous mathematics so they can see what’s at the core of the math they use and also to get them to do some really hard-core thinking (eg proving theorems or solving problems without knowing how to even approach a solution) that they might not have done before.
That’s not the point at all, John.
Universities get most of their Commonwealth funding from undergrad student load.
They (all) then choose to allocate it internally to student choices of subject.
So, for example, when I last worked at UQ in 2004, each body sitting in my lecture theatre was worth $750 to the School.
Salaries (about 85-95% of each department/school’s costs) have to be paid out of that.
So if you can get 100 bums on the seats of a lecture theatre to study X then you have a chance of surviving whereas if the pure maths mob or whoever can only get 5 they will go under.
The reason, as I pointed out to Rafe on his thread, why the Philosophy major at GU was abolished was that students didn’t take the subjects.
I am taking two second year sociology subjects this semester. Both have enrolments larger than 70. Yay! We survive!
I’m doing honours in pure mathematics.
I’m thoroughly depressed over the mathematical situation in Australia.
High school mathematics has never been taught worse. So it’s no surprise no one wants to study mathematics at uni. The funding is so poor and class sizes so low, we were given no choice of subjects at honours level, we’re forced to study whatever they can offer.
There are whole areas of mathematics we get no exposure to, we have to study other subjects independently just to fill the gaps in our undergrad years.
Recently we had a few international mathematics students here on exchange (from Germany and Vietnam). Australia is way behind other countries. Our German student was advised by his supervisor in Germany not to come to Australia as it would set his education back a full year.
No wonder we have a brain drain. We have to go to other countries just to get the education we deserve.