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Response to Entrepreneurial Education Derek Keats has made an interesting blog post
768 days ago

Jon Bischke, CEO/Founder of eduFire.com sent me a link to his blog post on Entrepreneurial Education (time for us to coin a phrase…), which seems to have some overlap with the notion of Education 3.0 as proposed by Philip Schmidt and I in an article in First Monday.

We regard Education 3.0 will see a breakdown of most of the boundaries, imposed or otherwise within education, to create a much more free and open system focused on learning. That is not to say that institutions disappear, but rather they become more permeable, allowing much more interaction with individuals and other systems than the traditional bricks-and-mortor, spatially constrained institutions allow.

According to the eduFire blog:

However, I think the strictly market-driven approach has some problems of its own that may lead to replacing one problematic with another unless understanding what is good about the current systems is kept in the equation (its not all bad!).

Tertiary education, particularly universities, is able to do what it does in part because of the fact that teaching is underpinned by research. That is not to say that researchers necessarily make the best teachers, although there is a strong correlation, but that the system of innovation includes a balance between education and innovation. This is what drives the economy in well developed systems, yet, as you say, there is no direct link between remuneration and contribution. So there is definitely some need for reform, but how to reform it without killing it is a big question to which I don't have the answer.  The worry I would have about market forces alone being at play is that it will gravitate towards a level of mediocrity, because on market forces alone it is hard to justify a broad range of research capability.

The other issue that you raise is less about reforming education, and more about reforming society. The reason that young people gladly spend money on games and less willingly spend money on education is two fold: society as a whole does not show that it values education to the level that it might. Thus we need to reform society. The second has to do with an area of the brain that produces pleasure sensations on the immediate result of problem-solving. We need to understand this as biological, and therefore understand that the same neuro-chemical biology can be exploited in education, instead of attaching value judgments to it and pretending that we are not chemically based life forms. A truly human education system will demand a fundamental understanding of what it means to be human.

Just to be clear, I am not disagreeing with Jon, but rather imagining that in Higher Education, the strictly market-driven approach might actually not work entirely on its own. If we look at he entrepreneurial Higher Education institutions, as represented by organizations such as the University of Phoenix, we see that they tend to concentrate on undergraduate education, with masters and especially doctoral programmes making up a tiny fraction of their sales. They also have a very low research output per staffing unit. They have shifted the emphasis from research AND teaching, to just teaching (or what the market accepts as such). In the short term, this may be good for the individuals participating in this market, but the question remains whether this is what is best for society.

On the other hand, if the US becomes dominated by such insitutions, perhaps that is a good thing for Africa. Maybe we can recreate what the US lost!

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