The Shifting Role of Universities
A few months ago, I started a Changemakers project with the mission to find out what an ideal education system should be like to develop future leaders.
During this journey, I have interviewed more than 30 inspiring social entrepreneurs, and changemakers within NGOs and impact driven companies.
During one of my meetings, one interviewee mentioned:
‘Schools must give the feeling that leadership is not something that we need to learn, but something we need to unpack within ourselves.’
Unfortunately, the focus of today’s educational institutions is on ‘what is not good enough,’ teaching students to be followers instead of leaders.
So what would an ideal university look like?
This is one of the questions we have been exploring during one of our EdSurge meetings and I got super inspired by what the cohort fellows came up with, but at the same time quite impressed about the similarities of their answers to the changemakers’ interviews.
The one thing that keeps coming back is the fact that education should be project based. Students should be involved in a learning-by-doing process.
Most universities focus on research output, however how many students decide to become researchers?
Most students study to get a job later on and progress in their careers. It is a fact. This is not to say that research is not important. However, universities should also bring the students closer to the real life environment, provide a flexible curriculum and assignments through real life cases.
When I speak to most of my peers, I get the same pattern in their answers: ‘I have no idea what to do after I graduate’. That is a direct consequence of a system focusing too much on knowledge accumulation, instead of personal and professional discovery.
In this linear development, most people end up in a chaos in the job market: most social entrepreneurs I have interviewed during my project mention that at some point they just started asking themselves: ‘What am I doing with my life? is this something that actually makes me happy?’
It is striking for me how little education focuses on personal happiness and wellbeing.
Education is breaking people down instead of empowering them to thrive and discover their unique skills. This is why there is a need for the role of the teacher to change as well: from an in class authority to a coach or mentor.
Nowadays, if I want to learn about content marketing, I don’t need to follow a 4-year programme. I can Google it. What I really need is guidance in understanding if the role of a content marketer is actually suitable for me.
As we discussed these issues in one of the EdSurge meetings, we concluded that in a world of information overload, the role of the university is shifting. Knowledge and content are produced everywhere. Therefore, universities should help students create structure in this chaos, by guiding them to discover their potential, and providing opportunities to apply it in real life contexts.
Students should be encouraged from a very early age to explore what they really want, follow their curiosity, and be able to switch between classes with complete different content and formats, until they find their path. As Phil Jarvis mentions:
“We need to connect young people and adults who are trying to find their way, to real-world work-based learning opportunities. All students need to be encouraged to dream, to learn constantly about the world beyond the school.”
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