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Academics & Anecdote

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Edited by Steve Bamlett, Sunday, 11 Dec 2016, 16:02

Academics & Anecdote

My experience of the world of people who identify as ‘academics’ – now a very wide category indeed - is mixed and I don’t myself now make the self-identification but one thing is sure, public pronouncements of their purpose and function are often compromised by the very contradictory manifestation of how ‘academics’ operate in institutions revealed by anecdote.

Sometimes this, more than anything reveals the practical consequences of very dangerous assumptions – about the purity and independence of subjects from applied interests or vocations.

What raised this question for me is the following from Guy Claxton (2015). Claxton is a very serious educational psychologist but he is also a ‘populariser’ as a writer in psychological sciences – writing person to person to his audience. In fact I like him for that – it makes him an even better educator.

He contrasts in his book the long period in which Psychology valorised its function as a pure science of reason, with its peak achievement in cognitive psychology (understood as the study of mind divorced from ‘reductive’ physical sciences). The pendulum has swung but I wonder if the anecdote Claxton (2015:30) uses to illustrate its effects still holds water in the practice of selective interview for undergraduate entry.

So human beings… pared down to their most rational and abstract capabilities, were deprived of almost everything that made them rich and interesting and real. Anything to do with psychoanalysis, or feelings, or friendships, or even ordinary interests …, was treated with a neglect that bordered on disdain. In my days as a young graduate student at Oxford in the early 1970s, I became involved in interviewing sixth-formers who wanted to read psychology. The only bit of advice I was given, for this important task, was to ask them if they were interested in ‘what makes people tick’, and if they said they were, to reject them.

Not long ago I remember that some university-based interviewers in social work would likewise boast that they would automatically reject applicants who said they wanted to enter the profession because they cared about people.

Claxton, G. (2015) Intelligence in the Flesh: Why your Mind needs your Body much more than it Thinks New Haven, Yale University Press.

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