Think of our current institutions as powerful chisels, relentlessly chipping away at our edges until we fit neatly into the tightly defined roles that our institutions have created. (John Hagel)

“Simply put, for the majority of students, the value of higher education is a function of its immediate employment prospects as opposed to long-term developmental and intangible benefits. This quest for value is especially prevalent in developed economies, where slow economic growth and scarcity of employment prospects fuel scepticism.”

Not certain how much of this article I agree with, as it is a bit policy wonk-ish. But the issues are real, and it is a useful summary. At least, it is what lots of people think. An unravelling is in place.

“All of education is fad-driven.”

All or just most?

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I didn’t understand  what the word design meant until I read Herb Simon’s ‘Sciences of the Artificial’. I don’t mean this literally of course. I knew architects designed buildings, and graphic artists coloured the world I lived in. Painters painted. Musicians composed. Quavers got ordered. Colour got rearranged. But mainly I saw the world in terms of taking it apart. I lived in a largely man-made world, but was invisible to how it was done. When my eyes opened in the morning, it was all there,just like the birds. I remember, when I was a student at Newcastle University, a friend from school, who was supposed to be studying fine art, taking advantage of cheap student rates to go to the cinema on a Wednesday afternoon. He would watch the same film again and again. Over and over. I didn’t really understand what was going on. The only film I had watched repeatedly in one sitting was “Let it be’ by the Beatles ( in the Cardiff Odeon I think). Now to anybody of my generation watching the Beatles time and time again, does not appear so strange. But why watch film X again and again? Surely you knew the plot and, unless the film fulfilled some sort of comfort role, what was the point. You knew what was going to happen. (But music?).
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