The University as Microcosm

This paper puts forward the model of 'microcosm-macrocosm' isomorphism encapsulated in certain philosophical views on the form of university education. The human being as a 'microcosm' should reflect internally the external 'macrocosm'. Higher Education is a socially instituted attempt to guide human beings into forming themselves as microcosms of the whole world in its diversity. By getting to know the surrounding world, they re-enact it intellectually. Such a re-enacting is a guiding theme in certain philosophies of education studied here. It is with the Neo-Humanist tradition culminating in Humboldt's reforms that an additional step was taken: the university should become itself the reflecting 'microcosm'. This role is nowadays taken up by unconventional LLE, though with far-reaching changes.
The paper is divided into four interconnected Sections each one developing a specific manifestation of the micro-macro relationship.
The main thesis is that: (I) contemporary schemes of never-ending higher education or of so-called 'transformative learning' and of 'universities-multiversities' have their intellectual underpinnings either in similarity or in direct contrast to specific predecessors. Inherent tensions found in these predecessors have left their mark on this micro-macrocosmic model to the extent that it is present in them; (II) the proposed analysis in terms of this model enhances significantly our in-depth understanding of some latent aspects in current trends in LLE and related innovative university schemes; at the same time this model helps us structure appropriately and without anachronisms our humanisticly-inspired critical response to them for abandoning the ideal of the 'wholeness' of the human person.     

The School in Question: a comment

Abstract

In Germany the tradition of university autonomy goes back to Humboldt's reform rather than the privileged corporations of the middle ages. Humboldt's concept of the university is still fertile as a model and a method for today's universities. The social significance of science in the modern world, increased expenditure on higher education, and the academisation of a growing number of professions seem to undermine the traditional legitimation of university autonomy. On the other hand good new reasons for autonomy can be derived precisely from scepticism with regard to a naive belief in the progress of science and to an all‐too‐narrow professionalisation of university education. The ever closer interconnection between ‘academic’ and ‘public’ functions of the universities has led to the replacement of the traditional ‘dualistic administrative structure’ by a ‘unified'one under a rector/president. The dualism of functions has, however, reappeared in the distinction between ‘legal’ and ‘more extended’ supervision by ministers. For the future a more precise distinction between global regulations legitimately claimed by the state and self‐government within the framework thus set should be aimed at.     

Private higher education: challenges for Australia and beyond

Among the chief characteristics of the post‐industrial society are ambiguity and paradox. In Australian higher education, as in other sectors of Australian Society, these have found expression in individualism, private initiative and entrepreneuship.

The ‘privatization’ of higher education now includes the imposition on enrolment charges, the re‐introduction of ‘full cost’ fees, especially for private overseas students, moves towards the deregulation of salaries and conditions of employment of academic staff and the establishment of new ‘self‐contained’ and ‘hybrid’ private higher education institutions.

In response to these developments, debate has tended to centre upon a number of mythologies which inter alia assert that private higher education is new to Australia, that it is foreign to the Western academic tradition and that such education avoids the employment of public funds. Moreover, it is claimed that while private higher education is ipso facto elitist, it will, through competition, result in a more effective and efficient public sector.

The above mythologies are examined in the light of past, present and proposed developments in Australian higher education, with particular note being taken of the establishment of the Bond University in Queensland.     

A level and Beyond: A Case Study

Question: At this early stage how do you feel about the transition from sixth-form life to life in higher education? Answer: I'm rather unsure as I expected that the standards expected would be harder but they're not; e.g. in English instead of expecting a greater understanding of certain ‘principles’ we have already studied, the subject has taken a shift in a different direction (is this clear?). Instead of doing character studies and interpretation of texts, we are applying headings such as ‘sonnet and ode’, ‘authority’, ‘varieties of non fictional prose’. (Laura, in a written questionnaire completed in her first year at university)     

Person Formulation in the Process of Schooling

Mainstream sociology of education has seemingly moved away from the micro‐world of schools and classrooms before we have fully understood them. This is an attempt to reassess some of the prevailing assumptions about the social processes in classrooms, particularly in early schooling. It emerges from an investigation into the formulation of pupils by teachers in primary schools using a four year longitudinal study of a cohort of pupils in two schools. It suggests that Becker's model of ‘ideal‐matching’ may not always be appropriate for understanding interpersonal processes in primary classrooms. Rather than the ‘ideal’ pupil it is apparently the ‘normal’ or ‘average’ pupil that is the significant yardstick in teacher‐pupil dealings.     

A WOMAN FOR ALL SEASONS: MARY WARD (1585‐1645), RENAISSANCE PIONEER OF WOMEN'S EDUCATION

The schooldays of Dutch upper‐middle and middle‐class adolescent girls in the nineteenth and twentieth century are related to identities of girlhood, with special attention to the question as to when and how girls entered the adult world. In the first half of the nineteenth century, leaving childhood meant entering the female world. After 1860, partly due to new ideas on girls’ education, girlhood became a distinctive period in life between childhood and adulthood. Until the 1960s, two conflicting identities of girlhood can be distinguished: a more ‘traditional’ one and a ‘new’ one. The first model was characterized by a sex‐specific school life, upholding an interconnection between girlhood and female maturity. Co‐education determined the character of the second model; this kind of school life contributed to a genuine separation between girlhood and female adulthood. Although ‘new’ girlhood finally gained the victory, the tension between these two models is still noticeable in the actual discussion about girls’ education.

     

DISRUPTIVE BEHAVIOUR AND EXCLUSIONS FROM SCHOOLS: REDEFINING AND RESPONDING TO THE PROBLEM

Behaviourally challenging pupils are a permanent feature of the education culture in the United Kingdom. The realisation that this is not a temporary phenomenon is an important ‘re‐definition’. The problem should be seen as part of normal provision.

Permanent exclusions from school are rising. Causes of behaviour leading to exclusion should not be assumed to originate within the child. Re‐definition requires recognition of their difficulties.

’Market economy’ and stretched resources militate against the ability of schools to implement recommended measures. There are issues for decision‐makers at all levels including targeting resources. Projects show exclusion is costly and damaging. The funding of preventative schemes would enable teachers to teach and not deny pupils their educational rights.     

‘Whoever does not write is written’: the role of ‘nature’ in post‐post approaches to environmental education research

While McKenzie mentions in passing her concern about anthropocentrism and human oppression of the natural world, she is mostly silent about the role of ‘nature’ in post‐post approaches to environmental education research. If one takes feminist poststructuralist ideas about voice and representation seriously, surely the place of ‘nature’ in environmental education research must be interrogated? Is there space for ‘nature’ in multivocal representations of research? How might our own polyvocality include our experiences of our animality? How might we assess the legitimacy of such representations? What are the limits and possibilities of post‐post approaches to environmental education research when ‘nature’ is taken into account?     

All the lonely people: the struggle for private meaning and public purpose in education

This paper argues that the ‘new world order’ achieved at the end of the cold war is in crisis, not generated from the threat of ‘war’ between Christian and Islamic worlds but from within western societies, specifically from the growing commercialisation and ‘privatisation’ of social and community life which has uncoupled the systems and activities of society from the collective and individual purposes of people who comprise that society. Drawing on interview data (life and work histories) from three cohorts (1950s-1960s, 1970s-1980s, 1990s to present) of US and Canadian teachers, the paper identifies evidence of this crisis in the fields of culture, education and public service (e.g. in the turning away from public and towards private pursuits as the motivation for one's ‘life's work’ or ‘passion’). It also looks to these fields in the search for answers to what motivates people and sponsors their meaning-making, specifically whether privatisation should be our only route to human meaning. The paper concludes that the personal ‘missions’ that people bring to their employment may be accommodated in some parts of the business world where people are given freedom to pursue their own ‘projects’, but these are largely frustrated in the micro‐managed and re‐regulated regimes of the public sector. Indeed, without invoking some ‘golden age’, the sense of vocation, public duty and ‘caring professionalism’ that characterised the ‘top end’ and ‘backbone’ of the public sector is diminishing as large numbers begin to withdraw their ‘hearts and minds’ while implementing the mandates and missions of others.     

Prioritizing the education of marginalized young people in Brazil: a collaborative approach

This paper explores constructions of the ‘new’ university student in the context of UK government policy to widen participation in higher education. New Labour discourse stresses the benefits of widening participation for both individuals and society, although increasing the levels of participation of students from groups who have not traditionally entered university has been accompanied by a discourse of ‘dumbing down’ and lowering standards. The paper draws on an ongoing longitudinal study of undergraduate students in a post–1992 inner‐city university in the UK to examine students' constructions of their experiences and identities in the context of public discourses of the ‘new’ higher education student. Many of the participants in this study would be regarded as ‘non‐traditional’ students, i.e. those students who are the focus of widening participation policy initiatives. As Reay et al. (2002) discovered, for many ‘non‐traditional’ students studying in higher education is characterized by ‘struggle’, something that also emerged as an important theme in this research. The paper examines the ways in which these new student identities both echo the New Labour dream of widening participation and yet continue to reflect and re‐construct classed and other identities and inequalities.     

Reconstructing the Work‐based Route: lessons from the Modern Apprenticeship

Abstract

Since the late 1970s, the work‐based route in post‐compulsory education and training has been struggling to create a respectable image through being seen as almost totally synonymous with discredited government‐sponsored youth training schemes. Yet, for many young people, who have no desire to remain in full‐time education after the age of 16, the work‐based route offers an attractive means of acquiring further education and qualifications. The introduction of Modern Apprenticeship, with its professed aim of raising the standard of the work‐based route, provides the opportunity to re‐examine how such a route could be reconstructed a decade after the launch of the YouthTraining Scheme (YTS). This paper draws on current research into young people's experiences of the pilot year of Modern Apprenticeship covering 14 occupational sectors. Interviews with ‘apprentices’ will be presented to highlight the ways in which young people conceptualise such issues as the form and structure of their future working lives, the realities of their local labour markets, the disadvantages of full‐time education (including higher education), the liberating potential of workplace learning, and the term ‘apprentice’.     

Ettore Gelpi: an appreciation

Abstracts

English

The aim of the paper is to argue for a curriculum model approach to problems of development in adult and lifelong (or continuing) education contexts.

The advantages of such an approach are outlined : relating theory to practice and social policies to educational processes; exploring professional role‐structures and their effect upon received curriculum assumptions in the adult sector, particularly the traditional needs‐meeting, remedial and compensatory elements of such assumptions.

The significance of recent theoretical and policy developments in adult and continuing education is reviewed in these terms and some distinctions made between alternative implicit models of the lifelong curriculum. It is suggested that adult education, as presently constituted, might, itself, be an obstacle to the development of an integrated lifelong education curriculum.

In order to elucidate this a number of curriculum concepts, familiar enough in the general theory of education, are considered in the less familiar context of adult and lifelong education: typologies of curriculum models are used to explore some issues of development in this context (e.g. objectives, provision, process, action, research models etc.)

Ideas of a ‘core’ curriculum, and of the ‘hidden’ or ‘latent’ curriculum, together with curriculum development and evaluation are also considered.

The existing state of the adult and continuing education curriculum is then analyzed within such a conceptual framework. The disposition of professional roles is described, together with the curricular implications of the structure of provision (the University Extra‐Mural Departments, the WEA and the LEA sector).

The ideas of ‘flexibility’ and ‘access’ are critically reviewed as a function of professional (rather than political) ideologies, and the adult‐lifelong curriculum is analyzed in terms of administrative criteria on the one hand and educational process and social action on the other.

A prevailing orthodoxy of continuing education is elucidated in curriculum terms, and contrasted with the curriculum implications of lifelong models. For example, such models stress the functional interdependence of learning stages in an ‘intrinsic’ rather than a ‘remedial’ way, whereas much thinking about adult and continuing education in Britain is concerned with compensatory responses to failures of early educational experience.

In conclusion, it is argued that, in curriculum terms, the development of a continuing or a lifelong education system is by no means as straightforward as is sometimes supposed, and that the obstacles lie primarily within the nature of present curriculum assumptions as much as the more obvious material obstacles to development. Adult education, as it is presently organized, articulates the same kind of curriculum assumptions as initial education. The curriculum assumptions of lifelong education, however, are much more concerned with education in terms of social control and knowledge‐content than with access to professional provision which reproduces curriculum models of initial education sectors.     

Can business schools increase student employability by embedding action learning into undergraduate management education? An account of practice

ABSTRACT

Management education is at a pivotal crossroads. In an increasingly globalized world, where change is the only constant, business school graduates leaving university are faced with ever intensifying competition and complexity. Universities have responded by increasing their emphasis on teaching ‘employability skills’ to graduates. However, undergraduate management curricula still often focus on Programmed Knowledge, which does not adequately prepare graduates for the labour market to which they will inevitably graduate. A Future Search exercise was implemented to help conceptualize new visions of the future of management education, considering the question ‘to what extent does management education impact on management practice?’ This paper asserts that integrating Questioning Insight and a scholarly practice approach into management education will better equip graduates for the world of work. The authors utilize Kotter’s 8-stage model of change to outline a pathway for change and action for business schools to adapt a scholarly practice approach to education into their curricula.     

American Schooling and History: an English view

Abstract

One, increasingly damaging, feature of the British higher education system that stems from its institutionalisation in the early nineteenth century is a sharp distinction between what is termed ‘education’ on the one hand and what is termed ‘training’ on the other.

It is claimed that this over‐sharp distinction lies at the root of much of the current dissatisfaction in Britain with the universities, even though much overt criticism is couched in terms of the curriculum and ‘relevance’. Recent initiatives at the University of Salford designed to transcend these distinctions and to bring about a closer relationship between the university and industrial and commercial concerns are described.     

Developments in the Concurrent and Consecutive Training of Secondary School Teachers

The paper focuses upon the two major routes into teaching in England. One is the concurrent route, 3 or 4 years in duration, which students enter at 18+. The second is the consecutive route, a one year course taken after graduation. Radical change in the pattern of teacher training in England has led to the concurrent route now being associated almost exclusively with primary teaching. The consecutive route is almost the only pattern for secondary teaching and is an equal alternative for primary. In the decisions which led to this situation the importance of the actual degree programme, BA or BSc has been held to be significant in terms of the necessary knowledge base from which a teacher must operate.

>One year PGCE courses have undergone major change in the last decade. They have become increasingly functional with an emphasis on meeting a student's ‘early concerns’. Both education studies and method studies have been re‐thought but a major change has been to establish the notion of school experience as the structural core of the course. Practical training for classroom skills has intensified.

The BEd course after a period in which course programmes were interlocked with diversified BA/BSc schemes has now become increasingly a four year concurrent model, thus abandoning the proposed changes of the James Report. Education Studies has been re‐thought in ways similar to the PGCE and school experience likewise has taken on still more significance and can even contribute to honours classification. The main subject has been made increasingly ‘professional’ and the degree has looked more and more to meet the generalist needs of secondary schools. This latter trend has, however, been overtaken by events.

In both courses more attention is being given to such key concerns as multi‐cultural education, children with learning difficulties, literacy and numeracy, the new technology and the re‐think of the curriculum necessitated by unemployment and recession.     

New Media in Medical Education

Abstract

Rapid development of informatics makes possible the application of multimedia and world informatics systems in our educational work. We are concentrating strongly on this theme at our university utilizing the support of different funds (Phare, TEMPUS, World Bank). We have established an education centre that opens new perspectives in medical education by using both modern and traditional media. Recently, we have engaged in a new instructional system in which the educational units connecting to the education centre can make the old dream of ‘problem‐based learning’ come true.     

Post‐school horizons: New Zealand’s neo‐liberal generation in transition

Dominant conceptions of the world infuse educational experiences for young people in implicit rather than explicit ways—through becoming, as Stuart Hall argues, ‘the horizon of the taken‐for‐granted’. In this article we explore these horizons as experienced by New Zealand’s neo‐liberal generation, currently ‘in transition’ from high school to further education, training and/or employment. As in Britain, further education has become a taken‐for‐granted feature of post‐school horizons for young New Zealanders but it is not a meaningful destination for all of them. The 93 young New Zealanders in our study have grown up during a period of intensive neo‐liberal reform, the speed and scope of which were unprecedented in Western economies. We interviewed these young people in their last year of high school and again once they were well embarked on their post‐school lives. We explore how the landscapes of choice of these young people have been restructured in neo‐liberal times: for some, the influences of parents, teachers, schools, universities and educational policy have come together to construct apparently wide‐open horizons in which university is a taken‐for‐granted destination. For others, however, these influences have remained subject to assumptions about ‘race’ and class that have a long history in New Zealand and the result has been a narrowing of future possibilities for participants. In all cases, we are concerned to explore the costs that are borne by these young people in this new environment.     

Unveiling the ‘logic’ of modern university in China: Historical,social and value perspectives

Abstract

This study concentrates on exploring the ‘logic’ of modern universities in China-a working concept that promotes a more in-depth discourse on the implicit illustrations of the ‘logic’ of universities in contemporary China. Drawing on the logic model, we explore the conceptualization of the ‘logic’ of university and examine how the concept of ‘logic’ of modern universities to be perceived, challenged and negotiated through the historical, social and value perspectives. The historical logics, social logics and value logics contribute on unveiling the ‘logic’ of modern university in contemporary China. We suggested that the ‘logic’ of university has important conceptual and practical implications for higher education, especially the importance of explicitness. The ‘logic’ of modern university in China is subject to offer a platform where expectations of university students are elaborated. In addition, the study also seeks to offer an insight into the conceptualization of the ‘logic’ of modern university in contemporary China.     

Psychodata: disassembling the psychological,economic, and statistical infrastructure of ‘social-emotional learning’

ABSTRACT

Psychology and economics are powerful sources of expert knowledge in contemporary governance. Social and emotional learning (SEL) is becoming a priority in education policy in many parts of the world. Based on the enumeration of students’ ‘noncognitive’ skills, SEL consists of a ‘psycho-economic’ combination of psychometrics with economic analysis, and is producing novel forms of statistical ‘psychodata’ about students. Constituted by an expanding infrastructure of technologies, metrics, people, money and policies, SEL has travelled transnationally through the advocacy of psychologists, economists, and behavioural scientists, with support from think tank coalitions, philanthropies, software companies, investment schemes, and international organizations. The article examines the emerging SEL infrastructure, identifying how psychological and economics experts are producing policy-relevant scientific knowledge and statistical psychodata to influence the direction of SEL policies. It examines how the OECD Study on Social and Emotional Skills, a large-scale computer-based assessment, makes ‘personality’ an international focus for policy intervention and ‘human capital’ formation, thereby translating measurable socio-emotional indicators into predicted socio-economic outcomes. The SEL measurement infrastructure instantiates psychological governance within education, one underpinned by a political rationality in which society is measured effectively through scientific fact-finding and subjects are managed affectively through psychological intervention.     

To keep America number 1: confronting the deep nationalism of US higher education

The Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, Robert Birgeneau, told Time magazine recently that America is in ‘an economic war’ with the world and ‘the importance of investing in long‐term research for winning that war hasn’t been understood’. This article argues that such comments are not just metaphorical or unfortunate word choices, but instead reveal deep truths about the role of American universities globally. The fact that people such as Birgeneau, as head of a ‘world class’ university, line up so readily behind US nationalism and militarism has serious implications for how we need to understand higher education not just in America but worldwide.