Sunday Posts

What's the relationship between Education Technology and Teachers?  The most common sense answer is that education technology is the new mode and the teachers are the old mode, linked somewhat in an asymmetric relationship like the one between the weavers and textile factories. The former is just an inefficient form of doing things which technology can do much better, or at least, be able to do much better when it becomes smarter eventually. Others take a kinder view of teachers and teaching. They actually contend ed-tech will be good for teachers. The advent of ed-tech, in this view, is the panacea for the 'cost disease' of education, because, as the economist William Baumol has affirmed, education is one of those trades where the 'productivity' of the Professor does not go up much, though their salaries keep going up. This problem is at the heart of the runaway costs of education in the developed world, particularly in the US, where college fees beat inf...

Elizabeth Losh of University of California San Diego contends that it is a mistake to view education as a product and not as a process. But even this is stopping short, because the question, process towards what, also must be asked. Burying ourselves in the process paradigm, powerful as it is, may obscure our inability to find a purpose. Many of today's debates centre around the question - education for what - and not answering this adequately may inevitably lead to this idea of education-as-a-pill. Indeed, the purpose question can be limiting too. The proposition, education is for an employment, is presented as a self-evident and universal truth all too commonly. While an education-for-employment must undoubtedly have its place in a modern economy, in many ways, this also serves as the key rationale for stripping education from its all other functions, that of joy, discovery and of being, and this is the process element Professor Losh is concerned about. Besides, this is the...

Why does one care for new ideas? Because new ideas are central to economic growth. And, without growth, we will have no modern economy. Because one essential part of the modern economy is credit, which rests on the assumption that we will have more than we have today. If the economies stop growing indefinitely, credit will disappear and there will be no 'modern' economy. The mere hint of no-growth will be the economic equivalent of an armageddon. Ideas, in a way, are the protean agents that mine the future for the present. Think of ideas as a tool that is curving out bits of the future for the present day, doing in the real economy which the financial mechanics of credit creation is doing in the money economy. One can call them therefore the lifeblood of the economy, because without these new ideas, we won't have a view of the future, no optimism and therefore, no economy. And, yet, idea is a painful thing. To be really successful in what an idea does, one nee...

One of the projects I started, and then abandoned, is the creation of an e-School, an enterprise school. This was a concept defined in opposition to the B-School, a place where one is trained to solve problems and learn how to communicate: The e-School, as conceptualised, was about finding problems, connecting with people, discovering opportunities, creating and leading. This is not about being entrepreneurs, though: Enterprise is for everyone, though entrepreneurship may need particular financial, social and opportunity setting. Besides, entrepreneurship, as it is defined today, is quite a narrow concept related only to a way of making money. In my conception, the e-School was about seizing the initiative in one's own life, and defining the agenda, rather than leading one dependent on other people's agenda. I started and abandoned this project at some point in 2011. This was the direction I wanted to drive the college I was then involved in to go. However, the strategy w...

As we search for a formula to make our students ready for a productive engagement in the economy, we are thinking of an 'economy' as a static thing. It is an industrial age construct of production and consumption, a system of hierarchical roles and proportionate rewards, with a somewhat predictable future. However, this is not the economy we live in: The economy, as we know now, is like a conversation rather than a structure, and it is those who change the conversation, rather than follow the structure, win. The main thrust of our attempts to make our students employable today is on the unity of rhetoric, on making sure that our students talk the language of the workplace. The formula we are seeking is based on an ever-closer integration with workplace: However, the poverty of such formula may be quite obvious once seen in the perspective of the squeezing of the middle class and rise of the superstar economies. The elevator of the middle class life is jammed, in the West ...

I was in an Education Symposium in Singapore last Saturday and had this moment of truth: As one of the speakers were complaining about the lack of employer engagement in education, someone sitting next to me turned and whispered, "those who complain that employers don't care about education may not have met a real employer yet". The latter is indeed the correct position to have, at least in a conference such as this, which is somewhat focused on the Education-to-Employment gap. The unannounced assumption behind such gatherings are always, as fashionable today, that education is out of sync with the wider commercial realities of the day, and there is a real concern from the employers that the modern education does not deliver the skills they need. The students, whose primary motivation for spending additional years in college is to have access to middle class life, are worried about it too. In short, whoever delivers a more relevant education for employment, wins. ...

How to design an institution where students learn how to learn? One would hope there may an easy formula somewhere, but the 'institution' gets in the way: Within an institutional setting, learning is often about how to master the institutional system and not about opening up to other possibilities. Within an institution, the rhetorical often trumps the philosophical.  Yet this dependence on rhetoric is perhaps a fatal flaw when social changes dislocate the institutional position. A rhetoric-bound institution, one that champions the skills of mastering its own system, can quickly become out of sync with everything else: No wonder employers today complain that the universities don't speak their language! Learning to learn, in more ways than one, is a philosophical exercise. It is a dialogue with oneself, rather than pursuit of intellectual superiority, and often achieved through learning things one would later discard (like understanding Newtonian physics at the ...