Over the past few years, experimental education has gradually become a trend at the nation’s schools. Some non-establishment schools want to use the ideas and practice of experimental education to implement reforms and even some state-run elementary schools, with the support and encouragement of their local education bureaus, have started implementing such changes.
However, the institutions that most need to adopt experimental education are universities.
Surveys have produced some striking statistics.
According to figures published by the International Labour Organization, the nation’s youth unemployment rate last year was 13.17 percent — much higher than South Korea’s 9.75 percent and Japan’s 6.7 percent. Compared with 10 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development member nations, youth unemployment has worsened in Taiwan faster than all of them except Italy.
However, according to Manpower Group’s 2016-2017 Talent Shortage Survey, 73 percent of Taiwanese employers report difficulty filling job vacancies — an increase of 16 percent compared with last year.
Why are there so many young people who cannot find jobs, while so many employers cannot find talented people? There must be something wrong with the higher education system.
The problem cannot be solved from the angle of conventional technical and vocational education, or indeed through industry-academia collaboration or by matching knowledge and skills. It must be tackled by renewing the whole concept of education.
Higher education as we know it has basically developed along two axes. The first axis is that of establishing departments based on specific disciplines, such as biology, physics and history. The other axis is that of setting up departments based on job orientation. These job-oriented departments reflect professional categories, such as tourism and insurance.
These ways of fostering and defining future talent according to traditional knowledge and work structures are from an outmoded mindset.
According to a World Economic Forum report titled The Future of Jobs, the structure of work is headed for major changes, with about 5 million jobs to disappear from workplaces around the world.
Faced with such uncertainty, we cannot safeguard young people’s futures by relying on the past.
In 2014, Stanford University launched the Stanford 2025 exhibit and Web site, which describes how education might look in future.
This vision involves three main aspects.
The first is “paced education,” according to which there would be no fixed semesters and students would decide their own aims, time frames and plans based on their study speed and career needs.
The second aspect proposes an “axis flip,” which entails flipping the axes of knowledge and competency, with course structures being redesigned away from traditional knowledge and toward skill-based learning. Campuses would no longer be divided into departments and institutes, they would instead be redesigned as spaces for skills-based study.
The third aspect is “purpose learning,” where there would be no more majors and minors. Instead, there would be themes and missions, the important thing being to work out one’s own purposes and reasons for studying.
Times are changing, so universities must change with them?
Faced with a study revolution, we should think about how to break out of the discipline-based, job-oriented models of education and find ways to make study more purposeful, enabling students to face an uncertain future.
Chiou Tian-juh is a professor of social psychology at Shih Hsin University.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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