Sunday Posts

I am scaling back my ambitions. No longer boiling the ocean, no longer trying to transform higher education globally! I tried and failed, but don't regret it. How else would I know what I know now?  I know many things. Higher Education is indeed in crisis, but the people inside the system do not know that. Professionalisation has many good aspects, but being perceptive about changes in the world is not one among these. There will be no revolution in higher ed, just decay. The private higher ed is already everywhere and it has changed everything - from the relationship with the students to what scholarship meant - but most people in public universities don't even know the difference. Higher Ed thinks critically about everything else but not its own practice. Some of it is wilful blindness. Things are going fine for most people: The usual cycle of conferences, papers, research grants - some years are better than others, but that is all. Students still come,...

I have spent a long time making the case for college education and I see I used two different arguments interchangably. The first of these was the human capital argument, the one about skills. Usually, given my line of work, this was about telling employers about work-ready graduates and students about jobs and income. After the universities, I used to cite 'graduate premium', not telling the whole story - that the figure is inflated out of proportion by the incomes of a few winners and collapse of the non-graduate income; most graduates have seen their income stagnate or decline in real terms ever since 2008. I used to argue that the quality of education is best expressed in the starting salary of the graduate (a desperate oversimplification that takes the labour market and all the implicit issues of race and gender out of the consideration) and that the countries should invest in colleges to gain competitive advantage in the knowledge economy.   The other argument was the de...

The coffee-houses were once called the 'penny universities', for a good reason. These enlightenment era spaces - free spaces, as one commentator has called them - allowed trading of information and meeting of minds. Those were the places where ideas could have sex and imagine the world anew. Coffee, replacing Gin as the drink of choice, stimulated and energised, but Coffee Houses were more than just coffee. It was about knowledge and ideas, a conduit of assimilating the great leaps in science and technology into social practice. It allowed congregations very different from the social clubs, being open to all-comers (almost) and allowing the chaos, the democratic surround, that facilitated a creative revolution. College is indeed the other enlightenment institution that is still with us. One may say college dates back further, back to the medieval or even ancient times depending on one's point of view, but the college that emerged out of enlightenment was ver...

The future of college is a popular conference topic. The discussion usually starts with the obvious - that the college must change as the economy is changing - and revolves around a familiar complaint - that the state-funded colleges are too bureaucratic, too expensive and too slow to adapt to changing realities. And, in the end, comes the panacea, privatisation, and not too subtle discussions about global higher education as a multi-billion dollar business opportunity. The problem with this narrative is that, first, private college education isn't that new - it is very much part of the problem rather than the solution - and, second, the pursuit of global college has so far been a graveyard of good intentions. Too many people, enthused by the conference speeches and reading the pumped up projections global consultancies churn out, have tried to create the culture-free non-regulated college-in-the-air, only to be rudely disappointed as the student millions fail to materialise....

I have argued elsewhere that the expansion of formal higher education is precisely the wrong thing to do at a time of great technological change, as college lacks the inclusiveness and openness of informal learning, and expansion of college discourages spread and persistence of informal learning opportunities ( see the post here ). This prevents the diffusion of technology, as lack of inclusiveness and openness in learning mean a lot of people are left out, unable not just to take advantage of technological change to improve their economic prospects but also missing out on applying the technological possibilities in solving their own day-to-day problems.  Now, I want to take this argument further: The college does not just fail those which it excludes, but also its own graduates. This is because the college, in its current form, does a really bad job at developing two most critical abilities that one needs to succeed in the globalised and automated workplaces (and societies...

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...

Should Education become more local, or global? This was a question posed to me in a conversation: As in these cases, I improvised an answer. But, as usual, the obvious answer is not necessarily the right one, and is indeed worth interrogating. Most education, at the present time, is locally focused. This is because Education, at least mostly, is a part of the State, that funds its existence and direct its agenda. Many educators around the world work for the State, or at least, their wages are subsidised by the State. Even in cases where a global institution sponsors education - Church is the most prominent example - the State controls it tightly, through curriculum and credential.  The dynamic of work and commerce, however, has been global. The WTO-inspired globalisation touched far corners of the world over the last few decades, as did the crumbling of the cold war politics. English as a language has gained currency, even in China, and the Internet and the Worldwide Web ...

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...