The Fallout of Higher Education : The Business of Christian Education XLVI

In this modern world, the common expectation is for the younger generation to have some kind of higher education degree.  The hope is that with higher education degree, our next generation will have better life, good life, and even the betterment of the whole world.  The hope is noble.  The expectation is not wrong.  But, is the hope pointed to the right institution?  Is the expectation landed on the right enterprise?  Many have gone through much trouble to figure out the cost of higher education and compare it to the debt students would incur over time pursuing their degrees and the prospect of repaying the debt, not to mention the waste of time if in fact the degree they are pursuing does not help them secure the jobs they hope for.  This is just an evaluation on the financial matter.  We have not even talked about the hope for a better life, a good life, and even for the betterment of the entire world.

Many higher education institutions grow farther and farther away from real life as they pile up research upon research, theory upon theory, but few of them improve life in its truest sense.  The gap between theory and practice remains huge if not widens.  Once students enter life in college or university, they are surrounded by fancy ideas, appealing theories, wonderful concepts, great dreams for the future, and so they soon forget the “land” they once were.  Every day they grapple with textbooks, discuss matters with professors, argue issues with their peers, to figure out the truth, but not in its practical sense, rather the truth in its idealistic form.  So higher education students become knowledgeable of many things, quick in navigating through logical statements, skilful in maneuvering the traps of logical fallacies and inconsistent arguments, and in that sense they become very bright far beyond the knowledge capacity of their predecessor.  They are the hope of the future, they are the better educated, the much improved species, the more advanced human generation, ready to take on the challenges of the current era, and more than capable to carve their signature in the new world.  But, the more they are “equipped” and “prepared” to brave the new world ahead, the more they grow detached from
the reality of life.  The gap between theory and practice remains, if not widens.

With theory flying above and practice stumbling on the earth, the world screams of the failure of higher education in shaping and contributing to the life at large.  The result of research conducted in higher education posts more confusions than answers to the problems of the world.  Each scholar brings in solid argument which is often an anti thesis to the previous thesis.  And so answers are elusive in nature and confusing to many simple minded people who live in the real world.  Graduates are sent into the real world but 99.99% they are required to appropriate their expensively gained theories or knowledge and skills to be applicable into the real world.  Many have failed due to the arbitrariness of the real world compared to the neatness of the life in the higher education.  Things are unpredictable in the real world, unlike the predictability of higher education academic realm.  The real world is not as structured and categorized in order as the academic life is.  Yet every year millions of high school graduates compete to enter the most prestigious higher education they can afford.  They disregard the high cost and the heavy burden of debt they ought to take up in order to get the highly coveted degree from the elite colleges/universities of the world.  Their eyes are fixed to the dreams of contributing to the world.  They believe that higher education is the right institution that will help them achieve their dreams.

Again, their dreams are not wrong.  Their hopes are not out of place.  The enterprise of higher education everywhere in the world advertises their education program and system in any way that is appealing to the young minds.  They do state their objectives as to help young minds to achieve their goals and dreams.  So people with dreams for the better future flock higher education dreaming that they will change their lives through their help.  They gained their degrees only to realize that help is just a dream but never a reality.  Their degree looks good in their resume but the industry knows that degree alone does not suffice the job opening list they advertise.  So they add other requirement, which bears much more weight than academic degrees from higher education, that is experience.  The real world knows that academic degrees, along with its training in theories and arguments, are 99.99% of the time not down to earth.  Theories have reached the moon and now mars, but the real life on earth is still in jeopardy.  So instead of answering the problems of life on earth, higher education pushes for knowledge that can only be used 100 years or 200 years from now.  It is like, you need only your hand to kill an ant, but you use an assault rifle to do it.  Theories are only satisfying other theories for logical defense and offense.  The abstract world remains abstract, never materializes in the real world.  The dreams are dashed and never come true.

The solution is simple actually.  Higher education should pay more attention to the integration between theory and practice.  The disparity between the two will only produce more skeptical attitudes.  Many more now are questioning the value of entering elite colleges/universities.  Soon they would not only question that, but also they would question the value of entering any college/university altogether.  If the theories and skills gained in higher education can’t answer the real life problems or solve the issues and challenges of the real world, why bother sacrificing time, energy, and other resources for something that is only good on the resume?  So, higher education needs to bridge the gap.  And it should be now!  It is urgent.  An emergency stall has sounded so loudly in the world.  Be careful that the stall will deafen us before we realize that an action is required.  We need to act.  We need to act very fast.  All research and theory should be focused on answering the world’s problems right here right now.  They must be made applicable to the real world.

            This solution will also help the other disparity every higher education deals with, the disparity between disciplines.  As specialization becomes the common rule in the world of academics, the gap between specializations grow naturally large.  Each discipline lives in a silo immune from interruptions and interventions from other disciplines.  As more understanding of each discipline can be gained through specialization, also the connection with other disciplines is being sacrificed.  This, in fact, is also one of the fallouts of higher education.  Such disparity contributes greatly to the disparity between theory and practice.  In the real world, one discipline contributes insignificantly without the collaboration with the other disciplines.  In NASA for example, in order to successfully send their rocket to the space, they need hundreds of experts in many disciplines to collaborate with each other.  In the world of design, color red in itself is beautiful, but if one only uses red, the design won’t be good.  So an artist uses many different colors in order to highlight, accentuate, balance, harmonize, and emphasize the beauty he/she captures in his/her spirit.  And not only colors artists use, but also the dynamics of dark and light, form and composition, symmetry and asymmetry.  Too much emphasis on theories will only widen the gap between disciplines and thus adds to the uselessness of theories in the real world.

            In Harry Potter V: The Order of the Phoenix, there is story on the layer of stories that illustrates the discrepancy between theory and practice.  The new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher for Hogwarts, Dolores Umbridge imposes upon the students to learn only theories without teaching them any real defense magic.  In the light of the rise of the most dangerous Dark Lord, Voldemort, Dolores widens the gap between theory and practice with the purpose of defending the Ministry of Magic stance that there is no danger imminent to the magic world.  And so, theories are advanced but practice is suffering.  The students fight back.  Under the leadership of Harry Potter, the students are learning to practice defense magic and thus they get connected to the real world and be prepared to face the dark arts.  Dumbledore Army is formed to bridge the gap.  And for sure, in the next installments of Harry Potter, The Half Blood Prince and the Deathly Hallows, the Dumbledore Army is proved effective to defend the magic world from the attack of the Dark Lord’s Army.  All the theories and skills are put together to answer the problems of the real world, and so problems are solved.

            Again, the solution is simple.  Integrate theory and practice.  Create an academic environment in higher education that allows for such endeavor.  Higher education should not be used to only catapult theories for the future, but more importantly it should be used to answer the catastrophic problems we now have, like the problem of pollution, food scarcity, deforestation, energy deficiency, etc.  If higher education begins to move their arsenal to integrate theory and practice on all fronts, then the hopes and dreams may actually become reality, all the resources being used to enter higher education might not be useless after all.