GOOD Education

Just read a fascinating article in The Australian. A quote:  "By 2025, there will be more Australians with degrees than ever before. This is an important first step, but it will be wasted if graduates haven't also been skilled to be the leaders and the thinkers of the 21st century. Achieving prosperity aspirations will require far-sighted reforms beyond a policy of funding universities on student demand alone."Another plea for thinking outside the square. I am not quite sure though whether this has to solely start with (university) education. Of course we still have not figured out what the essence of the good in education is (some claim it's the toolbox approach that is the substance of good education, others claim there is more to it, that is is about world citizenships etc. e.g. Nussbaum), but still I wonder: is that the only way to allow society to change? Because if you think outside the square, you still have to be able to find a relation with existing squares, so to speak. So not only the current generation of students has to learn how to be the leaders and the thinkers of the 21st century, also the current generation needs to be trained, educated, reshaped, whatever the wording. Otherwise we end up with a new generation that is disconnected and thus not capable of transforming. Because transformation needs connecting, of that I am convinced.

Also I am convinced that education needs philosophical scrutiny. Very few sector experience as many reshapings, innovations, new methods and experiments as the eduational sector, but compared to the intensity of experiments the theorectical foundation is rather poor. What is it that as a society we expect from education? What do we want our children to learn? What do we - grown ups (apparently:-)) want to learn? Who do we want to teach our children, our parents and ourselves? And where do we want to learn? Is the geography of learning and teaching, the where, important? Are schools the right form to work with for children? And if not, what, where and why then? Are schools on their way to museums as a form of education that we at one time thought was elementary to what we wanted to teach, be taught, learn and be educated in? A first grasp of questions that we by now quite desperately need to pay attention to. Starting with: what now is good education? Any thought anybody?

On teachers and teaching in higher education

In an interview with Loek Nieuwenhuis on BNR newsradio he ponders how teachers can be remotivated for their profession. Government thinks about financial incentives, Nieuwenhuis thinks about creating teams of people and a closer connection between education and the workplace. Whereas he mainly focusses on the vocational education, I think that remotivation of teachers on an academic level is also an issue to be taken into account.

Teachers on an academic level are either Phd students or people with Phd. But with no special didactical skills, training and at times even without any special inclination or ambition for teaching. The reasoning is probably that it is all about the content, but aren't we by now beyond that, I wonder? Can't we make more of academic teaching and training, get more out of academics and academic students if we pay attention to training academic teachers? And wouldn't that also be a simple first step towards knowledge valorisation? It is one of those items that I always wonder about. Lost of energy concerning education goes to primary, secondary and vocational training. Primary and secondary because they are the basis for all higher education. Vocational education takes in the majority of the people. But does that justify the little bit of energy that goes into professionalizing academic teaching? What constitutes good academic teaching? What is a good teacher? And what is good teaching? What is a good academic learning and teaching environment?

My own inclination would be that the answers to these questions are not only found by academic thinking and by thinking within the box of the academic system. Answers are to be found in practices on all levels of teaching, in cross overs between teaching and learning environments on different levels. In thinking and acting across existing boundaries and systems, so that new ones will evolve. Over the next weeks I will blog some more about this, as the ethics of education have my profound interest!

Yes, still here!

It's been quiet on my blog for a while. I am still here though and MK5060 is up and running with the first clients a fact again. But I am in the process of developing not one but even two new lines of business, each together with a partner. And I am writing my articles, with one completed in draft version and sent out for comment, the other one in the near final stage and then there is the book on bike2culture that is close to the first draft. I hope to be well underway to a new blogpost here at the end of this week!