wsheet

1. Using information: going beyond the point
You have been given the question ‘What is the purpose of Higher Education?’
What do I think? Why?
What do other people think? Why?

2. You now have some extracts from four different writers about what they think the
purpose of Higher Education is.
In your groups, read and discuss these views on the purpose of Higher Education, using
some of the critical reading questions.
1. Arthur H. Camins: lecturer and Director of the Centre for Innovation in Engineering
and Science Education in New Jersey, USA
Debate about the purposes of education never seems to end. Should young people become
educated to get prepared to enter the workforce, or should the purpose of education be
focused more on social, academic, cultural and intellectual development so that students
can grow up to be engaged citizens? With each new workforce development or economic
competitiveness demand on our…schools, there has been push-back from those who want
greater emphasis on a broader view of education. But it doesn’t have to be either-
or. Education should prepare young people for life, work and citizenship. Knowledge of the
natural and engineered environments and how people live in the world is critical to all three
purposes of education. Critical thinking, creativity, interpersonal skills and a sense of social
responsibility all influence success in life, work and citizenship. For example, unhappy
personal relationships often spill over into the work environment, while a stressful
workplace or unemployment negatively impacts family life. Uninformed disengaged citizens
lead to poor policy choices that impact life, work and citizenship. To paraphrase the verse in
the old song, “You can’t have one without the others.”

3. 2. Paulo Friere: a Brazilian educator and philosopher, mostly writing in the 1970s.
The goals and purposes of adult education as societal transformation and contended that
education is a consciousness-raising process. The aimof education is to help participants put
knowledge into practice and that the outcome of education is societal transformation. major
aim of education is to help people put knowledge into action to recreate society. Doing so,
will enable people to change the world – to humanise it and to liberate themselves. As such,
the goals and purposes of learning are oriented to societal as well as individual
improvement.
3. bell hooks: an American lecturer and writer, famous for writing about experiences
of racial and gender prejudice, and education.

4. The heart of education as a practice of freedom is to promote growth. It's very much an act
of love in that sense of love as something that promotes our spiritual and mental growth.
When people frequently ask me, 'What changed your life; what enabled you to come from
this working-class, segregated home where [your] parents were not college-educated people
into being one of our nation's well-known intellectuals?' [My answer is,] 'It's there in that
space where I learned to be a reader and a critical thinker.’
4. Mike Rustin: Professor of Social Sciences at the University of East London.
Opposition to the government's higher education policy [of greater focus on employability
skills] is frompeople who has so far been expressed in very traditionalist terms – with the
idea that a university has an intrinsic value and good. On the one hand, you have the
marketised view of universities as equipping people to earn their living, and on the other
hand, a traditional view that universities are about pure learning, but the students we have
here have always seen benefits beyond learning for its own sake. We have really hard
evidence to show that students are fairly clear about why they want to go to university – and
for the vast majority, it is about getting a better job and having a successful career. A lot of
people say what about learning for learning's sake? I find that problematic. Everyone has a
purpose for why they want to learn.