I wote this article 7 years ago and have now updated it because my predictions are unfolding.
A current emerging trend is the shift in western education where we are slowly moving away from the traditional education model of lecturing to students in over filled theatres towards personalised, customised education delivered by industry professionals. This education reneisance, where students are looking for industry mentors and practical education increases engagement and enhances learning.
This means a likely collapse for universities in the next 10 years unless they collaborate more with industry, and so we are seeing government, innovation specialists and educators all promising a brighter future with better collaboration. But are any of them doing this to improve life and learning for the students?
Library is free, internet is almost free, courses are easily available online. What is not so available in the current university are good teachers, and I say that with the utmost respect for those few of my teachers that were excellent, good teachers are a scarcity in the university today all they do is to sit inside the uni and read and write, and they no longer have industry experience, and so we are not closing the gap between education and industry, we are in fact widening it.
Because universities have grown so huge and so focussed on business rather than education, good and caring teachers are a scarcity today. Professors are expected to research and publish and work for their own courses and books to be sold in their own faculties that they have to look out for themseles and not for their students, their customers. So who is looking out for the students?
7 years ago I referred to Chris Andersons Ted.com talk on the idea of teacher as mentor, teacher as coach, teacher as informant, “Who the teacher is will also change”, Chris said. “It mightn’t be an academic in the future, it could be someone from industry…” And that is where we are right now. Large corporations are running their own training programs, private educators are selling course taught by industry professionals, and we have an emergence of internhip placement and work integrated learning companies that work to connect educators, companies and students.
Internships have been very popular in parts of Europe and the US for decades with the intension of being a transition between study and work life. Yet now, because some people are incredibly skilled at taking advantage of students, and some students don’t have the skills to make sure they are not taken advantage of, we are experiencing a somewhat bad name for internships. Scouring the media over the past 10 years there are countless articles blacklisting internships, and of course the universities don’t want to publish the internship success stories when it might loose them some of their own customers to industry, namely the students.
I’d like to take us back to the origin of the university, I’d like to walk you down the hall with Plato and Aristotle, I’d like to challenge you to ask them what the meaning of university is (learn how to think in a different way) and compare it to what we are doing today (conforming), and then answer this question: WHY do people go to university today? To learn to think? or to get a job?
So if we consider the fresco ‘The School of Athens’ depicting the worlds most well known philosophers, poets and mathematicians; is it a homage to great thinkers, or does Raphael pass on a message? Is it university’s responsibility to develop thinkers or doers, or both? And who’s responsibility is it to look out for the student?
