Post #83

On Higher Education - Part 1 With the recent developments surrounding the college admissions, I decided to make a post about it given our audience. Before we delve into the topic of affirmative action, we should establish what higher education is all about. What, in your opinion, is the purpose of higher education? According to Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and a philosopher, the purpose of higher education is not just to transmit knowledge and skills, but to empower individuals and foster critical consciousness. In Freire's view, traditional education offers a banking model, where teachers deposit information into passive students, treating them as empty vessels to be filled. He argued that this approach reinforces the existing power imbalances and does not promote genuine learning or liberation. Instead of the banking model, he offers a problem posing model where students are encouraged to become critical thinkers and agents of change (Liberal Arts comes the closest to problem posing method of education imho).* But in reality, we are still stuck with the banking model of education where schools and colleges deposit information into the passive receivers, students. I took a history class in the Spring semester where the professor used to lecture for 75 minutes straight. To make the matter worse, she had a 10% participation grade. This was coming from a professor with more than a decade of experience. Looking back, that was the most effort I put in a course evaluation. It make you wonder, if that is the case with experienced scholars, what do you expect from new PhD grads breaking into the academia? Interestingly, university does not offer training on how to teach as all professors are expected to have their own teaching styles. With the current banking model, higher educational institutions produce rule abiding workers who don't practice critical thinking, and only a handful of them would set out to change the world (This sentence is obviously exaggerated). The cycle repeats itself because without a college degree you can't get a "good job" with a fairly good compensation. That, fortunately, is slowly changing, and in the second part of this post, I'll focus on that, elite colleges and what you get from studying at one. *Taken from Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." @noordievdev