Nutrition education at the university level.

University education in any scientific subject seems full of paradoxes. As Lord Ashby has said, universities have two duties-to pass on the accumulated knowledge of previous generations and at the same time to encourage and teach new generations to think for themselves. Lastly, or perhaps firstly, a university must also encourage and provide time for a student to ‘find’ himself in the adult world and to work out a set of values by which he can judge himself and the consequences of what he does. To quote an American writer: ‘Intellectual barbarism seems to be fairly evenly distributed in the main scholarly disciplines dealing with the phenomenon ‘man’ . . . [by which I mean] an ignorance of history and philosophy, narrow expertise without wider horizons, a preoccupation with technical skills, and total insensitivity to the use of language’ (Berger, 1963). It is also a strange fact that university teaching officers are typically taken on as a result of their having done a successful piece of research, but having no training or experience in teaching. They are then put to teach still without any training in how to do it. However, the system seems to work, and in autobiographies of successful people one repeatedly reads how they were stimulated by teachers who were hopeless lecturers, but somehow conveyed an intimate and compelling impression of unresolved problems and the nature of scientific work, far more than they were by the rest of us who try to teach ‘correctly’ and systematically. As for the subject of ‘Nutrition’, there is controversy about its nature and scope. In a thoughtful paper, Harper (1969) says: ‘. . . there is a science of nutrition and a practice of nutrition and the same word is used for both.. . . It will contribute to clearer thinking about nutrition as a field of endeavour if we learn to recognize when we are participating in one and when in the other’. I agree. And the special feature of nutrition education at the university level is that it must provide both for people who will be going on to engage in the practice of nutrition and teaching at lower levels, i.e. giving the best advice they can in the light of what seem to be the established ‘facts’ of our subject, and for people who will be going on to question whether these are ‘facts’ at all, and trying to find and test entirely different ways of looking at the subject. The distinction does help to clarify what kinds of education are required by different student groups. For example, in the education of the medical, dental or veterinary student with no special interest in our subject, we need to use the necessarily small portions of their courses that are allocated to nutrition so that they can apply what they have learnt directly and in a practical way to their