Confounding Confusion

According to the Professor Deputy Commissar in the senior wing of the education kremlin, the junior wing’s diploma programme is “slightly schizophrenic” as between academic and “work based learning”. “We are educating . . the masses for . . competences and functionality”, he declares, while HE and high tech industries need “those . . capable of achieving . .  more professional levels . .  We may not have “cracked the balance”.

Wouldn’t cracking a balance unbalance it altogether? But never mind. The PDC goes on, appearing lost among  a manpower planning model of learning. and other traditional terms and values (well, after all, it was at the annual event known as  the Tribal lecture that he was speaking). Odd, though, for a scientist to downplay learning based on the real world, thereby disowning the father of science, Aristotle, and all his reasoning based on observation and induction. Meanwhile, “Never mind all that”, one can hear the Edukremlin say. “We don’t do epistemology here; we’ve got enough urinals as it is”.

Unfortunately for the PDC’s musings on balance, his overseers are caught, like the proverbial dazzled rabbits, in stupefied paralysis between their need to maintain an inherited Victorian school curriculum (ideal machinery for product control and testing at every turn of the cog) and an uneasy feeling that something else is necessary for developing the minds of a democracy moving fast forward into an unbelievably complex future. Even may come to them a vague impression that every individual human brain has the capacity to express multiple intelligences, infinitely plastic in their potential. So no wonder if these bewildered  AB state agents (After Baker) are in something of a tizzy about which new programme to try next, which agency to call in, which new quango to appoint, which kind of Ofsolve to invent.

The good Professsor DC would be nearer the mark if he’d diagnosed the Edukremlin mind not as schizoid but more like ‘polyphrenic’ – fractioned, disordered personality  (i.e. next door to madness?).

Whatever wickedness did we of the old guard do to deserve rule by such near-insane authoritarians? Do the Greeks offer a glimmer of hope with their wisdom: “Whom the gods wish to destroy etc. etc.”.

Juvenile

Mr Bean logs on

As the Open University enters its fifth decade, it has just appointed its fifth vice-chancellor – a computer wizard called Mr Bean. Chair of the appointing committee, Lord Haskins of Skidby, said Martin Bean was the right man to take the OU into the age of the web-driven knowledge economy.

‘At this critical point in the development of the OU, we need an extraordinary person to lead us in extraordinary times’. Mr Bean is currently head of product management, marketing and business development for the Worldwide Education Products Group at Microsoft in the United States.

A native of Australia, he has spent more than 20 years in global business education and training. So clearly he is the ideal person to turn Harold Wilson’s 1960s vision of a ‘university of the air’ into tomorrow’s ‘university of the worldwide web’.