Mindless education

Citation

Macdonald, J. (2003), "Mindless education", European Business Review, Vol. 15 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2003.05415bab.002

Mindless education

John MacdonaldJohn Macdonald is a Writer and Management Consultant, and a former Westminster City Councillor. He is currently working on a book called Dare We Trust Them?, a history of the UK's relationship with the European Union (co-authored with Sir Andrew Bowden).

Keywords: Management education, Education

AbstractThroughout the western world, the growth of managerialism – as philosophy and practice – has led to an increasing emphasis on educational qualifications and an expansion of higher education. But the education offered to future managers is at once superficial and narrowly specialised, rather than concerned with range and depth of knowledge, like the traditional liberal education. This article is adapted from the author's book, Calling a Halt to Mindless Change: A Plea for Common-sense Management. Here, he outlines some of the deficiencies of this form of education, with its propensity for fads and simplistic abstractions. He calls for a more holistic approach to management in general, and the education of managers in particular.

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  By education most have been misled; So they believe, because they were so bred(John Dryden, 1631-1700).

  The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of students, but for the interest or, more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters (Samuel Smiles, 1812-1904).

  Aye, 'tis well enough for a servant to be bred at an University – But the education is a little too pedantic for a gentleman (William Congreve, 1670-1729).

Education and training clearly play a major part in the development of business managers. So in looking at the performance of managers across the corporate business world, it is necessary to consider how they were developed. This is a very broad subject, capable of sustaining many books in its own right. For the purposes of this article, education and training are confined to some general comments in the following areas:

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  the state of education;

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  faculty and students;

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  learning from history;

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  business schools; and

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  corporate education and training.

Mindless changes have been perpetrated by mindless managers. The majority of these managers have not been recruited from a host’of natural oafs or village idiots. For the most part, they are university graduates, and in a large number of cases they attended the best business schools. There are two sides to the educational coin, though, because we have also identified other managers (presumably from the same sources) who do not exhibit the same propensity for mindless change.

There is little argument about the fundamental need to increase and improve the education and training of a greater proportion of nation-wide populations. The debate is generally centred on how increased education is to be funded and the specific ways to achieve standards. The perceived need to provide every student with "self-esteem" requires that everyone can make the standard. The latest educational concentration on "attitude" is reducing rather than heightening standards. There are two paradoxes buried in those arguments that are mirrored in the management practices of business. Both paradoxes are rooted in the continuous competition between quantity and quality. Some would argue that the comparisons have reached the stage where society is losing out on both fronts.

The first paradox stems from the sheer scale’of the issue. In many countries, the combined population of students and faculty and the services involved in many universities have created campuses that rival substantial towns in their size. These massive institutions have steadily developed introverted cultures that have moved them away from their original purpose. The management and senior faculty of some universities exhibit the chateau-management tendencies of business corporations. They have increasingly adopted the same techniques as those corporations in attempting to meet their own mass-production requirements. Revenue rather than customer focus, short-term financial budgeting, departmentalized and hierarchical organizations, and overspecialized curricula are just some examples. Modern universities are hectic hives of mindless activity rather than quiet havens for thought. The paradox is that in chasing the laudable objective of educating the masses, "centres of learning" have sacrificed their traditional values. Under the unrelenting pressure of numbers and the bureaucratic obsession with grades, our universities and business schools are in danger of confusing the difference between education and training. Vast numbers of graduating students have been taught what to think, rather than how to think.

The second paradox is similar but relates to the amount of information and knowledge available to the student. Information technology provides easy access to accumulated knowledge on a vastly increasing scale. The action-oriented values of our society lead the student to believe that knowledge must be learned rather than understood. There is little time to absorb, debate, question, and adapt this knowledge to present circumstances. This is a world of abstracts, sound bites, and great books that are, one is told, "skilfully condensed to heighten dramatic impact". It means little that the purpose held by the condensed author had little or nothing to do with dramatic impact. This high-speed environment demands a constant revelation of encapsulated truths and panaceas to add to the mounting megabytes of conventional wisdom. Our seats of learning have partially succumbed to the strident calls for change and in so doing have sacrificed the search for profound wisdom. Or perhaps they are no longer interested in producing graduates imbued with the desire to search for wisdom.

The quotation from Congreve at the head of this article would be politically unacceptable in today's society, but it does contain a germ of truth. It was also a harbinger of the direction that higher education was to take. Our schools, universities, and business colleges do exhibit a pedantic dedication to ensuring that students absorb a determined amount of facts and specific skills as the primary objective. This approach is designed to produce students who meet the prescribed requirements of the segmented and specialized outside world. This in itself is not wholly wrong, but is more akin to training than to education. There is now no time for the "gentlemanly pursuit of knowledge", but in more prosaic terms "how to think" is being removed from the modern curriculum. It takes too long!

There is little evidence of real debate about the concepts behind the facts that are so diligently crammed. The traditional practice of debate and argument with one another and the tutor about what was being learned helped the student take ownership of concepts and establish his or her own set of values and principles. These values became the necessary horizons for subsequent thought and action. For example, increased emphasis on specialization has steadily eroded the concept of foundation subjects and the foundation year for professional degrees. Once upon a time, the student spent the first year of college education devoted to such subjects as philosophy and logic. The aspiring architect spent a year studying art and the nature of materials. The engineer and the surveyor spent their first year of higher education on a spread of 12 subjects that would include economics, common law, and other subjects not recognized as totally relevant to their specialization.

There are many other examples of the foundation concept of higher education, or education to fit the participant to play a determinant part in society. These foundation subjects were once considered essential tools in learning to think to some purpose. They provided a perspective outside the specialization; more important, they instilled in the student the habit of asking questions. These questions were often answered by more questions, which in turn were answered by still other questions. To modern educators, much of this would seem a pointless exercise and a waste of the student's valuable time, which, they seem to believe, should be dedicated to the task of passing information-dominated exams. Yet arguably this approach was at the centre of the Western world's most successful educational system. To those who experienced the process, it was a powerful route to greater understanding of the world in which we live; though it has to be said that with its concomitant disciplines it was not always understood at the time.