It’s a shame that they weren’t able to give you functioning equipment, and then penalized you for it. There is a thinking there that is fundamentally flawed. I can’t even articulate what is wrong with it, but it just seems like a corruption of responsible education.

I’ve been reading a bit about recent educational styles in the west. One criticism that academics make about some aspects of education is that it doesn’t equip students with a common vocabulary that allows us to communicate with a basic, implied level of knowledge. Basically, it means that a student might be taught how to read the manual for a specific piece of technology, but be unable to generalize that knowledge to other manuals because they lack the broad common knowledge about computers and computer architecture that is common to both manuals.

I guess I’m wondering, do you think the TAFE course teaches people to learn computers and networking? Do you feel like it taught you how to use some specific techologies, without an emphasis on generalizing those skills? Did it achieve a balance between those two aspects of learning?

It kind of sucks that my reply is like 1/10th “that’s awesome”, and 9/10ths “what went wrong”. I kind of get an impression that you rightly aren’t too impressed with the opportunities TAFE offered you. Lets talk about it a little!