Miguel Ángel Escotet » Scientific

Changing Traditional Higher Education Toward Lifelong Learning

Miguel Angel Escotet — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 17:10:43 +0000

The most relevant and controversial issue facing the university is one of its raisons d’être: formation, the teaching-learning process. The English word ‘formation’ – among other meanings – indicates ‘the act or process of forming’ or ‘the shaping or developing of something’. The word ‘formative’ means ‘having influence in forming or developing’. Similarly, I use the term ‘formation or formative education’* to describe a kind of education which forms or develops a person’s character, values and morals as well as merely making him/her knowledgeable or giving him/her skills. A distinction between teaching, training or instructing and formation or formative education should be made. To instruct is a process whereby teaching in the sense of training remains on an intellectual or cognitive low level and formation is a process of academic socialization which inserts itself into the personality and the emotional domain, manifesting itself in the subject’s behavior. Therefore, formation and instruction are indivisible and interactive elements in the process of education.

The challenge posed by the diversity of knowledge, the plurality of science, the multiplication of branches of knowledge and the speed of change has underscored a problem of academic and curricular effectiveness. On the one hand, in so far as knowledge has become more complex, varied and impossible to embrace in its entirety, it has become correspondingly more difficult to impart. On the other hand, the segmentation of fields of knowledge has led to the fragmentation of language, producing a generation of professional people incapable of communicating between one branch of knowledge and another and, increasingly, between the cultures of science and the humanities. The controversy between general education and specialized education, between professionalization and the liberal study of the arts and sciences, between once-and-for-all learning and a lifelong learning process are subjects for debate within the university community and society.

However, the interdisciplinary approach, general basic formation and training, flexibility of the curriculum permitting adaptation to change, the extension of the university mission to cover permanent formative education are all trends which have been gaining prevalence in recent years and which run counter to the other view which favors professionalization as direct training in a single discipline. The risk of specialized professionalization is very great. After all, this model has been very much in vogue since the incorporation of industrial production systems and the development oriented political and economic systems of the previous century. The result is not particularly edifying. Never before in contemporary history have there been more unemployed university graduates and professional people than there are today. Unemployment among university graduates is not only the responsibility of the social-economical system, it is the result of the interaction of that system in evolution with a university which produces rigid, passive professionals educated on a once-and-for-all basis.

A more adequate balance between generalization and specialization would reduce the under-exploitation of professionals in the short-term labor market on the one hand, whilst, at the same time, promoting the updating of professional qualifications in keeping with the new demands of society in the medium term. The false dichotomy between formative education in the sciences and the arts requires a radical change in teaching and learning strategies. The university will have to strike the right balance of aesthetics, science and ethics in the education of men and women, so that they will emerge knowing a lot about their own field but also enough about other disciplines: in other words, the university as a center of aesthetics, science and basic human values. But even if the extremes of educational models were drawn towards the center, this would not resolve the whole problem. To do this, the core university culture would have to become oriented towards permanent education and lifelong learning, which, in turn, would require course contents, teaching methods, educational technology, best practices, means and the duration of courses to be kept under constant review, but primarily it is absolutely necessary to modify the present teacher-centered education system.

The realities underpinning the change from the traditional university to an institution oriented towards lifelong education could be summed up as follows:

Scientific and technological advances cannot be included in the formal university curriculum as fast as they occur. Even social knowledge is far ahead of the anticipatory analysis to which higher education ought to aspire. Some response must therefore be found for new employment requirements, professional retraining at every age and research into new fields of science.
Knowledge about man and his world has been carved up into ever smaller and more specialized segments, but a deeper knowledge of matter and its characteristics leads to an inter- and transdisciplinary view and a unifying concept of the world, both in the field of science and in the humanities. The new trends have once again broken down the artificial barriers which had been erected between the different individual sciences.
The application of the scientific method in its widest sense identifies the sciences with the arts, leading us closer to a scientific-technical humanism, where pure reason must be in harmony with the aesthetic and ethical sense and the sense of the transcendence of humanity.
The concept of lifelong university education is essentially holistic, implying an attitude of constant research and the permanent search for new knowledge. It therefore breaks the trend toward fragmented education and the sole pursuit of diplomas which stress the characteristics of the once-and-for-all university education which exists today.
The expansion of university objectives to include permanent formative education and training is closely linked with the modernizing concept of education. There is no one period for studying and another for acting. Learning and acting are a part of the existential process of the human being.
Permanent or lifelong university education is consistent with the dynamics of change and uncertainty of a society which requires not only that people should possess the necessary knowledge and techniques to function in the modern world but, fundamentally, that they should be trained to permanently learn, re-learn and un-learn as one of the main solutions to educate for uncertainty and to adapt to the future.

Lifelong education requires institutions of higher education to organize formative education towards a learner-centered education, to deformalize their structures and services to accommodate new teaching-learning methods, to set up two-way systems of cooperation with business, industry and community, to create educational networks with the non-formal systems in society, to recognize experience and knowledge acquired in ways other than the conventional lecture room and academic laboratory, to incorporate communication and information technology in the teaching-learning process, and even to de-formalize classroom attendance. Universities need to pay more attention to student learning outcomes than to student admissions. The real challenge for higher education is not to demonstrate success with students already prepared for success but to achieve success in preparing unsuccessful students. This also means setting up multiple inter-university and inter-educational networks to break down the false barriers within scholarship and the transmission and generation of knowledge.

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*A psychological and educational analysis of such terms are presented in Miguel Angel Escotet (1992), “Information and Formation: The change of paradigm in university distance learning”. In Ortner, G., Graff, K. and Wilmersdoerfer, H. (Eds.) Distance Education as Two-way Communication. Frankfurt: Verlag Peter Lang, 88-101.

It Is Impossible To Transfer Science Between Cultures

Miguel Angel Escotet — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 00:42:43 +0000

Can we transfer science from one country to another or from one culture to other culture? Is a scientific fact different in the United States and China? Who owns science? Are we confusing science with technology?

Science does not come into existence by spontaneous generation. Scientific knowledge is not only an inheritance from the past but also the intellectual activity of the future, the only dimension of time that belongs to mankind. To know scientific facts is part of the teaching-learning process, but to generate knowledge is an integral part of the future of science. But science is not created; it is discovered. The scientific fact is there, alongside mankind, not only after it is revealed. The laws of science have existed since the beginning of time; the human being has merely verified their existence. Laws of nature are not necessarily linear. They can be part of instability, fluctuations and chaos. Indeed, order and chaos can be the consequence of natural laws that are not linear. Classical mechanics, quantum mechanics or relativity have been related to science’s ultimate goal which is reaching certainty. But new developments on complexity can also relate science to uncertainty in which laws of nature no longer describe certitudes but possibilities (Prigogine and Stengers, 1988, Prigogine, 1996). The applications originating from these scientific principles -linear or non-linear- are the heritage of human beings in alliance with their environment. Thus, while science is an accumulation of possible facts regardless of mankind, technology is the application of scientific principles to a specific environment or culture.

Therefore, while science is not transferable from one culture to another since it is universal, not the heritage of any one culture but of mankind, technology on the other hand is an adaptation, made by human beings, of the scientific fact to the culture or the environment in which they live. “Technology is not neutral. It conveys social values and relationships” (Thành Khoi, 1986). Imported technologies, therefore, need to be transferred from one type of culture to another so as to confirm that cultural survival is not threatened and that on the contrary its use may help to raise the quality and standard of living.

This transference becomes even more important when the development gap between the cultures producing the technology and those importing it is very wide. The latter cultures have generally been called Third World countries, poor countries, or developing countries. For the purposes of this article, the third description is the most suitable, but we would even prefer to call them “countries in transition” since this conveys a strong sense of faith and hope for their integral growth. The term also embraces all the countries with unequal and moderate endogenous development, formerly classified under an ideological heading as in the case with most of the Eastern- and Central European countries. As a matter of fact, a “developed country” is a presumptuous definition or label since no one will be ever fully developed. Life is permanent change.

There are of course some associations in different disciplines of specific concepts. For instance, specific connotations of the term of educational technology which imply a critical attitude that cannot be overlooked. In cultural circles in the importing countries, such technology has come to be associated with mechanistic theories of learning and seen as no more than a teaching aid, or else it has been censured as a mechanism ensuring dependence on more highly developed countries from a political and social stand-point.

There are justifications for such negative attitudes; some experiments have not been successful. But alongside these criticisms there is a certain uncritical acceptance of claims that technology is sufficient in itself to ensure development, bringing the educational system of developing countries up to the level of those more advanced. In fact the situation is much more complex.

If we refer technology to the process of education, the precise meaning of educational technology should be clarified. A first definition may be found in the etymology of the word. For the Greeks, “Tekne” was the equivalent of “art” as distinct from knowing how to do something purely from personal experience (empeiria). “Technique” would mean knowing how to do something over and above the level of personal experience, on the basis of accumulated collective experience, and in which the principle of efficacy is inherent in the survival and diffusion of such interpersonal knowledge or skill. When thinking analysis or study (logos) is added to technical knowledge, then we have Technology, so that this would be the theory of technique. Technology, therefore, is half-way between purely speculative science and applied technical knowledge. One can go further and say that those branches of science that lead inevitably to practice or performance may now be classified as technological science, and obviously Education comes into this category (Escotet,1992, 2000).

The purpose of technology is to apply scientific knowledge systematically to the solution of practical problems. Such application, however, is carried out reflectively, so that scientific and theoretical knowledge is valid so far as it solves and explains these problems. This consideration of technology as the science of action does away with the frontier between theory and praxis in a logical continuum of thinking/action and action/thinking or in a complex system. (Escotet, Aiello, Sheepshanks, 2010)

Technology requires a systemic, comprehensive concept of the problems it tries to solve, in such a way that the solutions will not give rise to new problems. Technology is not an end in itself since it is not progress if it is considered as a logical course of action which includes the process of analysis, the choice of the most suitable strategy, the application of relevant solutions and the evaluation of results; in other words, technology refers not to products but to processes, so its value is purely one of interrelation with social and cultural life.

We must avoid being dazzled by technological products which are simply alienating unless they are used to improve human life, whether personally or collectively, To overcome such alienation, available resources must be built up, and conditions created for the development of new resources to provide proper solutions adapted to each culture and society. And this is particularly necessary in the case of education where one is acting on the human being himself, unique and inimitable as an individual and forming part of a social group with its own tradition and culture.

All over the world there is concern about the consequences of the indiscriminate application of destructive technical products, harmful to the environment and the cause of new burdens for mankind; in the case of education there is, in addition, the anxiety over the ideological analysis we have already mentioned of the type of world and the type of learning that could be the result of this lack of foresight.

The purchase of aircrafts, television sets, satellites, computers, mobile devices or schools might give the impression that countries are importing technology. When one begins to understand that technology is, in reality, a capacity to attain one’s ends with one’s own resources, then we might say that the possibility exists of a transfer of technology. In summary, it is impossible to transfer sciences. Science is an indivisible part of the universe. Its essence does not belong to anybody. Who owns the gravity principle? However, technology not only can be transfer but it should be mandatory to do it from one culture to another in order to preserve the environment, and most important, the sustainability of cultures, the cultural ecology. Education plays a major role in achieving this goal.

Escotet, M.A. Martin, A. and Sheepshanks, V. (2010) La Actividad científica en la universidad. Buenos Aires: Cátedra UNESCO-UNU y U. Palermo.

Escotet, M.A.(1992) Aprender para el futuro. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

Escotet, M.A. (2000) Cultural and Social Foundations of Education. Needham Heigths, Mass: Simon & Schuster.

Prigogine, Ilya (1996) The End of Certitudes. (A translation from La fin des certitudes. Paris: Odile Jacob).

Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1988) Entre le temps et l’Eternité. Paris: Librairie Arthéme Fayard.

Thành Khoi, Le. (1986). Science and Technology: Options for Endogenous Development. In Cao Tri, Huynh et al. Strategies for Endogenous Development. Paris: UNESCO, 19-75.