Higher Learning

This is a philosophical challenge of learning from Derek Bok, the president of Harvard University. It is also a well-written scrutiny of the American system of higher education from the perspective of 1986. (I should admit that the book is a sewed hardcover and manufactured with very high quality)The author questions "the belief in knowledge for its own sake", and admires with the colleges where the faculties have formulated common goals and work collaboratively to achieve them. This concept is called "competency-based learning", where the students are primarily developing effective communication skills, improving analytic abilities, strengthening problem-solving capabilities. Competency-based learning is opposed to memorizing nomenclatural raw data that the students will soon forget if they won't use this data on day-to-day basis. Throughout the book, the author emphasizes on the imperative of measurement of the quality of learning, and shows the difficulties of such measurements: how can it harm the education by orienting it too heavily to fit the measurements.The author shows pros and cons of the American system compared with Italian, German, French and British systems. Admitting the lack of adequate means of measurement here as well, the author judges that the number of foreign students entering American universities may be a trustworthy mark to conclude that the American system is nevertheless the best. The author doesn't take into consideration that these foreign students may use American universities as an opportunity to enter the wealthy job market of the U.S.Interestingly, in 1986, the computers were extremely expensive and did only start to invade the field of education. Nevertheless, the attitudes of the author towards computers were very optimistic. The author did envision that computers will revolutionarize learning, although he admits that "...technology has raised great hopes on several occasions in the past only to disappoint its backers. Thomas Edison once predicted that the phonograph would revolutionarize teaching, and, several prominent foundations and corporations spent large sums in a futile effort to bring radio and later television into widespread classroom use. In each case the new technology foundered because it cost too much, aroused the opposition of teachers, and failed to deliver the pedagogic gains that it enthusiasts had promised."