Education And so the students arrive at university without dreams except for a single one: to get a diploma so that they can get a job â and make money. And why shouldnât they want that if this is what society tells them to do? The belief that society values science is pure hallucination. It values only the money that the science is asked to deliver. Why else are universities under constant threat to get in money regardless of the content of the research? Why do the criteria of success for German universities talk about anything but content? Think this: the majority of people in Europe (and, as I read somewhere, also in the US) do notwant genetically modified food. And yet they are being told that they have to accept it. And they are told that they have to accept it because there is no scientific proof of its adverse effects. As if it were a simple matter to stop this food once we know what these effects are. This is not only hard to accept in a democratic society. My question is: why do all this science, then? Apparently it is not being done so that in the end society gets to choose and say what it really wants to have. It is there for certain institutions to make money from it. Pure and simple. It means that if you are against the abuse of science your only safe bet is not to become a scientist. The logic of money is everwhere. Is it not natural that students say: I am doing all this to make money, all I want from my degree is a job? If we want them to change their minds, we should change ours first. But we are not. Instead we are dabbling on about changing the learning habits. Different recipes have been tried to stem the tide. In the US, rising costs have led to fee hikes, and students are more and more in debt. Which will focus their attention even more on the question of where the money is in their education. In Europe, one has tried to standardise education. Students get credit points, which supposedly are uniform in value. Universities however are subjected to a quasi-market oriented regime where they get part of their funding according to performance. Performance in turn is measured by some bureaucratic numbers. In Germany they are: number of first degrees, amount of extra mural funding, and progress in equal oportunity hiring. None are about content or quality of teaching. None of these approaches have worked. It is not because the students are protesting. They in fact are very polite. But typically they are absent minded. The content is not what they are in for. They are asking: what do I have to know to pass the exam? The politicians and presidents of the universities alike talk about performance but they hardly mean content. They mean money. In other areas of life you call that prostitution. It results in getting a mere substitute for what you really want. Because what you really want you cannot get by paying money. Motivation is a primadonna. It is not singing when you want it to. It disappears once you start asking too loudly for it. If I want my students to listen, I need to give them a story of why it makes sense to do what I am doing. Why I am doing it despite everything. The Road Ahead But not only the students need dreams to carry on. All of us need them. I need to have a dream as well. I need to know why I am doing what I am doing. Increasingly however I am getting tired. The administration is turning academic life into a madhouse. We get no time to think, because that is something that canât be measured. No credit points for thinking. And we are losing hope that the next generation will have any chances to get a meaningful job in society let alone at a university. Higher education is at a crossroads, really. It needs money, and the money isnât there. To cover that up, they are making up excuses. Thatâs it. Increasingly, I see myself doing research not for a future generation (who would that be?) but for the people with whom I went to university. Because there hardly is a next generation. Jobs are being cut, university life is being stripped down to the barest necessities. The propaganda has it that there is less money because people arenât working hard enough, but thatâs not how the bureaucratic machine functions. Remember that awards are relative: you get more if you are better than the rest. If everyone works more, you have to work more just to stay even with them. And if they start working less, then less work on your part will also do. Universities will become marginalised. Already the discussion of what its role in society is or should be is nonexistent. Because interference with politics is not desired. Intellectuals do not appear in television for fear that what they will be saying is too difficult. Their role is not any more to come up with a beautiful story but to get money in. So universities turn into private companies for funding.And the state nods in agreement. The dream of learning has disappeared from higher education. Yes, more and more students enroll in first tier institutions (high schools, universities), but less and less of them do it because they want to learn. Call that realism. I call it a wasted chance. At one point the money will be so scarce that they start closing down universities. And we get to see the other side of Big Education. From; http://www.cassandralegacy.blogspot.com.au/2015/01/lost-dreams.html
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