A HIGHER PURPOSE FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

….in order to act as a driver for change, education itself needs to change, to become transformative, to change values and behaviours. ( Leicht, Combes, Byun, Agbedahin 2018, p29).
Steve Sterling and I recently argued in a short paper for the International Association of Universities( https://iau-aiu.net/IAU-Horizons) that in our experience there is a growing and urgent need for our universities to become systemic learning organisations themselves, if they are to play a critical part in addressing the social, environmental and economic issues we currently face. We need to amplify and accelerate a shift from the old model of university as ‘ivory tower’ towards an “adaptive, innovating, and co-evolutionary engagement relationship with community and society.” This transformative model must avoid the ideological effects of the standardising global testing culture, and a rationale based solely on the needs of the economy. The traditional model must be critiqued and circumvented in favour of a higher purpose and role aligned to addressing the immense challenge and possibility of securing social and ecological wellbeing in our troubled times.
As Gregory Bateson agued the logic of learning is essentially the same as the logic of evolution. The process of biological evolution is best understood as the education of a species. Adaptation is a learning process. A species learns about its environment and embodies that leaning in progressive modifications that allow it to adapt ever more successfully to its environmental niche. Those species that fail to learn, that fail to adapt, perish. Only the “educated” survive. Only those species that “learn” to adapt will procreate and prosper.
If we consider the impact of this insight on our ideas about education ,then the evolutionary model of learning , as John Dewey saw long ago, is less cerebral and more pragmatic. Most approaches to education imagine it to be about packing the brain with facts and truths. For evolution, however, experiments are essential to improvement and flourishing.
If experimentation, mutation, and random modification are essential to the logic of evolutionary learning ,then much of the current debate about the importance of educational standards maybe fundamentally misplaced. If educational policy pursues national standards it would appear that our nation’s students are being moulded into a single species of androids; cloned by knowledge genes that are as close to identical! If we have learned anything from evolutionary theory, it is that a rich ,healthy ecology requires diversity. As Ashby’s law of requisite variety mandates-the more varied a given gene pool, the less vulnerable a species is to disease. Any uniformity in the gene pool makes them more vulnerable to any change in their environment.
As Cristina Escrigas (A Higher Calling for Higher Education | A Great Transition Initiative Essay-2016) has advocated:
“ From a monoculture to an ecology of knowledges. The academic community and society as a whole need to challenge the idea that the knowledge residing in the hands of experts is the only valid kind. The supremacy of the rational-scientific paradigm is rarely called into question, but an expanded perspective provides space to consider additional ways to understand reality and to generate innovative solutions to persistent problems. Moving beyond the belief that the only criteria of truth and validity are found in science; we can see that recognizing the inherent incompleteness of knowledge is a necessary first step toward epistemological dialogue between different sources of knowledge.
Even when academia incorporates knowledge from diverse sources and methods— such as community-based research, indigenous knowledge, and intercultural dialogue—it often dilutes the contributors of non-conventional perspectives rather than engaging themselves in real dialogue that seeks productive exchange.
We cannot solve today’s problems with the same kind of thinking that created them.
Universities need a way of connecting different types of knowledge, acknowledging their existence and giving them equal value. It is time to decolonize knowledge and adopt a knowledge-democracy framework, considering the intellectual contributions from diverse sources and worldviews. “