Sunday Posts

Unlike the Hollywood aliens, the future of Higher Education can not be expected to land in the United States alone. The American universities, of course, lead the world in academic prestige, cutting-edge research and endowments. They are, collectively, the best and the brightest, and attract the best researchers and best students from around the world. And they are not just intellectual world leaders but also represent the biggest education industry in the world, sprouting an ecosystem built around the success and prestige of the great universities. However, if higher education has to change and make sense in the future, this is exactly what needs to change. I write this as I am rather tired of reading literature coming out of the United States which portrays the future of higher education in the universalist terms. It seems that there is only one reality - that of higher education in America - and every other variation from around the world represents intermediate stages of a journey ...

For those who want to change the world through Powerpoint, there are some fundamental beliefs about Education. Like, education is about 'human capital', making the individuals receiving education economically productive.  And, that, education is important for national competitiveness, the better educated its people are, the more competitive a nation will be.  That education is really about skills - being able to do things - rather than learning: Knowledge can be acquired on-demand and at leisure.  That educators should build close connections with employers and look to align themselves with their future talent needs. These are ideas everyone - at least everyone who count - agree on. And, such agreement means that all the attention, along with all the money, gets diverted to certain specific things. And, with money and attention, a certain kind of education - a specific idea of education - becomes pre-eminent. It crowds out other ideas, drives out all...

Lani Guinier has written an important book, which is also a pleasure to read, and this is about the concept of Democratic Merit. Part polemic, against the mindless system of SAT-driven education system in the United States, part Education Treatise and partly high minded discourse on how democratic mindsets work, it should be read not just in the US but in other countries and contexts, because education is all too often seen as a technical thing focused on preparing Doctors and Engineers, and divorced from its social role altogether. The argument in Professor Guinier's book hinges upon a definition of merit given by the Nobel-Laureate Economist, Professor Amartya Sen. In Professor Sen's view, merit is an incentive system for the actions the society values. The merit system as defined by SAT (and other tests), an individualistic, context-blind ability and intelligence, this book argues, is out of step with the requirement of a democratic society. Ms Guinier expands her ar...

I just finished reading Arthur Levine and Diane R Deane's excellent Generation on a Tightrope: A Portrait of Today's College Student (Jossey-Bass: 2012), a follow-up of Arthur Levine's earlier works looking at the college students in the 70s ( When Dreams and Heroes Died , Jossey-Bass, 1980) and in the 1990s ( When Hope and Fear Collide , co-authored with Jeanette S Cureton, Jossey-Bass, 1998). Just like the previous volumes, this is an insightful read, covering institutions across America and exploring the life of American undergraduate students. The most pleasant thing about this, however, is its optimism: It is not one of those books decrying the state of education or the non-engagement of today's graduates. Instead, this talks about the challenges (that today's graduates are less attentive in the classroom, more likely to plagiarise, talks global but would fail to recognise the names of world leaders, etc.) and follow-up with analysis why this may be so and ...

Early History While the growth and prominence of For Profit institutions, particularly of degree granting variety, is a relatively recent phenomenon, For-Profit education has a long history on both sides of the Atlantic. Reigner (1959) traces back the origins of For-Profit instruction to 1494 and the development of double-entry book-keeping in Italy. A popular book-keeping textbook was published by Hugh Oldcastle, who ‘taught the booke’ in London (Reigner, 1959). Hayes and Jackson (1935) traces the history of early business schools to the practice of one-on-one instruction on book-keeping, which evolved into the English Grammar Schools in the early Eighteenth century, which promoted a practical education for students who were not interested in classical training common in schools then. In 1617, a college at Henrico was proposed to raise money for cash-strapped Virginia Colony (Land, 1938, quoted in Kinser, 2006), and capital was raised for the same: However...