Higher education’s creative tension

By 2029, he predicts, scientists will have reverse engineered the human brain and computers will have the recognition powers of human intelligence.

So change will be enormous, and we will have to work to ensure that we harness the new for the good of our communities.

But the answer to meeting the challenges we face is not to fetishise change, or to be locked into some kind of imagined permanent present, and neither to romanticise the past nor to ignore it.

To use another Foucauldian term, people are always “becoming”. We come from out of the past into the present, and we hope for a future.

The extraordinarily difficult task for educators is to hold past-present-future in a creative tension that honours each element.

We at Macquarie University have given much thought to this, and in 2010 we will launch a new undergraduate curriculum that respects the past, understands the challenges of the present, and which we hope will equip graduates for a fast-changing future.

Macquarie’s aim is not just to teach facts and skills but to open students’ minds to life-long inquiry. We believe higher education should not be just about developing narrow abilities, but that we should help graduates to be wise as well as knowledgeable.

Our new curriculum is designed so that students have the chance to follow the Delphic oracle’s command to "know thyself", especially to know the limits of their own competence.

We believe a university education ought to produce educated men and women who understand the world and their place in it, and so we have designed a curriculum that ensures students will be exposed to issues beyond their chosen specialisation.

As John Stuart Mill said, a university education should not just churn out a lawyer or doctor or engineer, it ought to produce educated men and women who understand the world and their place in it, who can write and speak coherently, who know what a poem is and who can tell a symphony from a jingle.

Going further, we believe such an education will give our students the skills to deal with the challenges of the present and the facility to adapt and flourish amid the upheavals of the future. In that way, we hope they can be less like the Arnold of Dover Beach, and more like Tennyson’s Ulysses who yearns to “follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.”