I'm glad you said "at least at undergraduate level" - a chap could become quite offended!

I think your comment "you can't simply assume that students are interested because they have taken the course" sums up the pointlessness of the drive to get all students leaving school into 3rd level academic education.

Michael: indeed! One would not wish to offend. Not this early in the semester anyway!

And Chekov, well, as I said I have mixed feelings, though I didn't have the wit to tell you what's good about teaching in modern higher education!

For one thing, every cohort tends to contain some very wonderful people and teaching them is far more rewarding than they can imagine.

On getting more people into 3^rd level education, well I've no innate objection to a mass higher-education system, as long as it's coherently designed. Like many academics I'm despondent at the managerialism that accompanies British public policy initiatives, but we shouldn't confuse the merits of the intention with the demerits of the application.

The problem with the drive for higher education access, across the UK, is that higher education, despite the widening of access, has actually been entrenched as a vehicle for transmitting wealth from one generation to the next. It has largely ceased to be the great driver of social mobility that it was for our parents, at least in many parts of the UK. Instead, 'massification' (to coin a horrible phrase) has generally involved a widening of access to people within certain social groups - generally those groups least in need of whatever benefits university education brings.

Moreover, in a sense, the old idea of education as a good-in-itself has been eroded because, to the extent that that idea prevailed in the past, it did so partly because people didn't need to compete for good jobs post-varsity. Now that they are under huge pressure to get results they have naturally become more difficult to engage with on a scholarly level (and that's not to mention the tragic consequences of the anti-discursive and results-oriented tactics adopted at second level).

So the British mass-education drive, to my mind, represents several layers of missed opportunity in terms of the emancipatory potential of education (that is, poor people don't come and when they do, they join their fellows in seeing higher education as an option for improving their CVs).

So, in a roundabout way, I don't entirely agree with what I'm reading into your point. I sympathise with students who aren't automatically inclined towards scholarship - they have more urgent interests to attend to so it just ain't their fault. And their lack of interest doesn't mean that mass higher education is bad for society. Arranged properly, it can be a very good thing.

Some very good tips over on Crooked Timber - thanks for the link. I wonder if most students would get more out of their courses if they waited a few years, say until their mid to late 20s, before studying at 3rd level (not to mention postgrad). A few years off studying - not just a gap year - to travel and to read widely while doing a not too demanding job, might set them up better for the initiative and independence needed to get the most out of a degree course. But nowadays the pressure is on to get a well-paid job, repay the student loan, get the mortgage and start paying into the pension scheme.

Jenny - I totally agree. I know that many aspects of my undergraduate days were wasted on me and I suspect it's the same for a lot of people. I suppose the thrust of my point, though, is what you say in your last sentence: students are responding to their unfortunate circumstances that are not likely to change soon and that is the challenge higher education teachers face.

Ciaran,

In my experience, the most productive tutorials - or least silent, in any case - occur when the academic in charge is less uncomfortable with the silence than the students. Sit there. Say nothing after your question, except that you can sit in silence all day, and eventually somebody will blurt something out. Usually it's the same student - ahem - but more often than not, once one student has said something, I've found, the idea that no-answer-is-too-stupid seems much more actual to everyone else. But then, you'll probably contend this. Alternatively, pick a student out. Tell them not to answer, but to pick another student to answer. The student you picked will generally just answer it themselves. Whenever I choose to be silent, it's generally because I fear being seen, by other students, as that guy.

To relate blogging and tutorials: I experience the same feeling of uncertainty, even stupidity, everytime I say something that is proceeded by silence and, indeed, an empty comments box. If only blog hosts supplied a nodding elder, thanful for everything you have to say - no matter how ridiculous.