Gordon Freeman writes:
"The taxes of every fast food employee who may never walk on a campus are supporting students who go to colleges and universities around the world. In that sense, the debate [about higher education] is not “academic” or an intellectual plaything, it is profoundly serious. As a result, I believe universities have not only a responsibility to help envision a sustainable future but they have a duty to do so."
I wrote...
As universities are the “manufacturer” of minds running the economy and politics of this country, I agree that university faculties have an obligation to change. Unlike at school, where there is a large focus on citizenship, although arguably not taken as seriously by many schools as it should be, universities have no focus on the wider sense of community and duty other than to create a network of “friends” that can help one get on in their chosen career through their alumni. This sort of self interested networking: developing relationships with those that can help in your career and dismissing any other kind of friendship as irrelevant, then carries on into professional life. The political system is one area where evidence of this can be seen, as is the media - like minded people gathering together to inculcate their views onto other minds.
Universities need to focus more on turning out minds that understand the importance of community and the wider world outside their own particular spheres and disciplines. The focus on self service and regarding oneself as superior to others simply because they have been granted a privileged access to higher education needs to be halted. I would recommend measuring the value (superiority) of a person in society in ways other than the number of qualifications gained in an education system that has apparently produced such self serving, greedy, uncaring leaders that seem to dominate press coverage.
As an aside, the current focus on qualifications as the means to improve the British economy is in some ways farcical. Forcing people who do want to attend college to stay on in the “prison” of education or to “prove” they can do the job they have been doing very well for many years with silly paper qualifications is a joke. Cleaners at my place of work were recently forced to undertake an NVQ in “cleaning” - in their own time, not in work time that is. A waste of their time and our money that made them feel that their many years of experience counted for naught. Someone who has been carrying out a job for years and doing it well should not have to prove themselves in a nonsense qualification that taxpayers and those sitting such silly "tests" have to pay a useless Quango for.
As a later years graduate, who CHOSE to study for a degree, to prove to myself that I was as intelligent as many of the graduates who had dismissed my contributions when they discovered I had not attended a university, I believe that people should be allowed to study if they choose to do so and would certainly reccommend it as a means of learning how to structure one's thoughts. But we must recognise that for some people it is not the way - hands on learning, taught by someone who knows what needs to happen can in some ways be more valuable than theoretical knowledge that is often forgotten and put aside when work actually begins.
The current state of affairs in the country and indeed in the world, highlights the fact that we need more than book learning and worthless paper awards to develop a new future in which everyone should be rewarded for what they do POST EDUCATION - not what they know. I fear that the current focus on getting qualifications, particularly for those who neither want them or need them is taking funds away from those who want to improve their knowledge - as in the EQL debacle.
We know that if we all focused only on our self interests the human race would quickly die out, yet we fail to take account of this in our daily lives these days. And sadly those that spent their formative years in higher education institutions, those now in power, seem to be much more professional self servers than many other members of society who lack a university education.
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