Sunday Posts

I have made this point before, that we need less College, and more Coffee-House, learning ( see the earlier post ). Here, I shall attempt to explain, one more time, the difference between the two. Let's start with the obvious. College is formal and Coffee-House is informal. Colleges are state-sanctioned and funded; coffee-houses don't have anything of the kind. Colleges are about teaching; coffee-houses just allow people to meet and talk. The models, expectations and outcomes are very different in these two kinds of places and the learning they enable. And, yet, there is comparability and a form of competition. More college and more formalisation of education mean less time for Coffee-houses and less recognition for the stuff one learns there. Between the two kinds of knowledge - explicit and official for the college, tacit and tentative for the coffee-house - privileging the former means less importance for the latter. If all learning must be validated and recognis...

I wrote earlier about the tension between The College and The Coffee-House - between formal and informal systems of education and knowledge sharing - and I intend to focus my attention on this in my work in 2018. My thesis is simple: Most learning is experiential, contextual and situational; however, learning as a socially mandated function must have form, be broadly applicable and based around general principles. This tension is indeed central to the idea of knowledge, between the high ground of theory and field of practice, and it is a dialectical relationship. The societies value both, but often more one than the other, depending on economic and political situations of the time. Generally, stable societies privilege 'scribal' classes and formal learning, but breaking of times and paradigm shifts are generally brought about by ideas emerging out of practice; therefore, when times change, Coffee-houses play a crucial role. In our own time, right now, we have privileg...

I wrote previously about the College Trap ( see here ) - how college can't be denied to anyone in a democratic society and yet, the prevalence of college may privilege one kind of learning over others and undermine democracy itself - and, as someone pointed out to me, this is quite antithetical to my own ambitions of setting up a college eventually. At this point, my broad point about the inaneness of college education needed more empirical justification.  For a concrete example, I thought of picking Research Methods, that one thing that legitimises an academic degree, that magic wand that baptises a graduate. My choice is deliberate: I hated it and have long thought about why I hate it. And, the affectionate place that it holds in the academic imagination - in fact, it is itself the academic imagination - makes it a suitable candidate for interrogation.  I shall provide some more justification in case you are wondering what the fuss is about. Let's start with the qu...

Over the last several decades, the politics of college has reached a consensus: Everyone seemed to agree that more people attending college is a good thing. The usual conservative position, that college should educate a gifted minority who would assume the 'commanding heights' of the society, has been undermined by the proven link between 'gift' and wealth, as well as the claims that we live in a knowledge society. The weary refrain indulged in Britain's top universities - that the elevation of Polytechnics as Universities in the 1990s was not the abolition of polytechnics, but rather that of the universities - is considered an elitist view. People like Charles Murray, who complains too many people are going to college, are usually viewed as out-of-date and out-of-touch. What's fashionable is the commitment to expand public access to Higher Education, such as the one Obama declared, and the promises of eliminating college tuition fees, such as the one that mad...