Sunday Posts

It may seem a strange question, but this is one of the key debates in Education: Should Education be about acquiring knowledge or developing skills?  One side of the debate are people like E D Hirsch, Michael Gove and advocates of Common Core; on the other a diverse group of business executives and left-leaning educators, from those who think education should be about skills business needs to those who think what goes on as knowledge is really the dominant culture and it discriminates those from poor or minority backgrounds. Yes, I generalise, and there are many shades of argument on both sides. At the core, however, is the debate about the purpose of education along the lines of knowledge versus skills. It is important to remember in context that this is not an idle debate: The objective of both sides is to affect some sort of complete transformation of the education system. Besides, it will also be a mistake to think that both sides are starting from scratch and fightin...

Accounting, as a profession, is as iconic of the middle class as it could be. Its making had all the classical elements of emergence of a profession: Granting of a monopoly of a practise to a set of people competent in a standard of practise who forswore to adhere to a code of conduct. Becoming an Accountant was a task that demanded commitment and competence, and being one meant a prospect of lifelong employment, respectable income and a middling rank in the society. Alongside Medicine, Teaching, and Engineering, Accounting has been one of the pillars that held the Middle Class economy. However, its very strengths may be turning into disadvantages at this point of time in the 21st century. The high stakes assessment that qualified the Accountants, like all high stakes assessments, focused minds and skills on mastering the system, rather than serving the wider world. The standards of practise evolved into rules, something that a programmed machine could do, at least for the most p...

As a trained marketer, my default position is - we must start with the customer! I have taken this as an article of faith, a common sense position that underlie all businesses, that businesses exist to solve the problems of the customers. That lasted till I started putting it into practice. The customers I met either did not care to talk to me or wanted me to give a solution. The entrepreneurs I met told me that the customers do not know what they want (quoting Steve Jobs, I figured out). And, the marketers, I realised, were all telling me that it is about telling the customer they are getting what they want, while giving them what we want to give them. I know this is cynical, but this is exactly what it feels like. True, we get to hear about companies which love their customers. But, once you have been inside the marketing box, it is hard to know what is for real. And, besides, even if some companies do and we get to hear about them, we get to hear about them simply as they are ...

The currently fashionable view in education is that knowledge does not matter.  The thesis goes something like this - at a time when you can search for almost anything in Google, why does one need to know anything?  So, goes the argument, the point of education is not to enhance knowledge, but to enhance professional skills. So, it is not the texts and discussions about ideas and subjects, but rather abilities such as thinking critically is the point. As long as one can do such things, they would be able to know. There are deep flaws in this view. First, can one think critically outside any domain? This view of secular professional skills, professional skills outside a domain or practise, undermines the importance of professions itself. While this is symptomatic of the time (where a humble blogger pretends to write about epistemology), the domains remain important and the blogger in question should know the limits of his endeavour. The process of education is s...

Everyone loves a good theory. In this difficult job market, the idea that one can conceive an education closely aligned with what the employers need sounds like a good idea. It works for the employers too, who are having to look harder and harder for the right talent and frequently blame the education process for this problem.  All too often, this does not work. McKinsey believes that this is because the employers and educators have different priorities. For many educators, getting the students to successfully complete the courses and earn the requisite credentials are good enough. For many employers, the requirements are very very specific and they want to do as little educating as possible themselves. Besides, the employers' requirements are always evolving whereas education remains a long process: Even if a perfect solution could be found to bridge the gap of understanding - through, for example, building corporate universities - the time lag still remains a significant ch...

One of the most troubling questions for me is what is happening to knowledge. Knowledge has been commoditised, I am told. It no longer matters, as one can know by typing a string of words on Google. My interlocutors' point primarily was to say that education must change under these circumstances: It should be about something other than knowledge. That knowledge is easily accessible is a somewhat common-sense observation, but I wonder this is one of those things that we call conventional wisdom. While it may be waiting on the other side of Google, do I always know what to type? And, even before that, do I know what I should be searching for? Would this count as knowledge? However, I must concede that the contemporary discussions about the effect of Google on Knowledge somewhat acknowledge the first issue: Knowing how to search. In fact, this is their precise point, that education will be less about memorising facts and more about the mechanics of fact finding. That has...

We are often told that knowledge has become abundant, available, and commoditised : In short, it is not important anymore. Some of these claims are rested on the idea that Google has changed everything. The skills of memorising, retrieving and reproducing information, a task which we took as synonymous to knowing, can be done by computers and smartphones easily, quickly and cheaply. Progressively, the machines can translate, contextualise and correlate better, and it is fair to expect this process nearing perfection over our lifetime.  I am currently reading Tom Standage's ' Writing On the Wall' , a history of social media, where he described Cicero, when he was made the Governor of Cilicia, a province in today's Southeast Turkey, requesting his friend Marcus Caelius Rufus to keep him in the loop by sending the political news of Rome. Caelius, the ever faithful friend, therefore sent him copies of the daily 'acta' ( 'acta diruna populi Romani' , or...

It is an odd thing to say that professions may be dying. If anything, experience would typically suggest the opposite: Never before, such prestige was attached to the professions much as Law, Accounting, Medicine or Engineering. In fact, one would suspect a professional credential is absolutely essential to get by in the modern world, and therefore, practitioners in many non-professionalised fields, such as Business, want to be professionalised. However, it is usual to see the future with the patterns of the past, and I would argue that the Professional Society may actually be behind us now. The evidence may be all around us: Andrew Keen moans this fact in The Cult of the Amateur. We can debate whether this is good or bad (for Mr Keen, it is a disaster) but the sense of seize is all around us. The Accountants who fear self-assessment returns, the lawyers who hate the legal advice websites, the karaoke hating professional musician, the journalist made redundant by internet news. Eve...

There are lots of people who think MOOCs are game-changer, and others who think it is just a passing fad: I just like the classes I am doing on Coursera and Udacity, and believe this is a good thing. But, lately, I have discovered that there is more than just access to great learning through these platforms: They represent a way to meet great people. And, more than ever, this community is global: I am doing a course on Small Business Growth, and the community has over 60,000 people from all over the world, including a handful in London and the Home counties. And, I would like to believe that this is indeed something unique, and need to be celebrated. If there is one defining thing about our generation, that is our faith in human progress. Everyone, right or left of the political spectrum, seem to have accepted that human history will move forward, and we would find our way out of even the most intractable problems, such as global warming and worldwide recession, through human inge...

Yesterday, for me, was a day of fascinating conversations, particularly on the state of Higher Education in India. This is with two senior executives from an Indian Higher Education institution. We talked about a number of things, including the changing mindset in India and the the regulatory regime, as well as the possibilities, and pitfalls, of collaborating with British and American institutions. For me, forever an enthusiast of global education, it was insightful, if dispiriting, discussion. Importantly, it gave me yet again a clear sense of the private higher education space in India. We agreed on most things, except one perhaps, and that is the role and importance of knowledge in Higher Education. The Indian Educators were quite clear: Knowledge is no longer important. Commercially, they did not think it made sense, as the students don't care about knowledge: They want the degree, as easily as they can. The parents don't care what the students are learning, they said...