Mind the Gap Between Education and Reality
This Is A Personal Account of My Participation at QS Reimagine Education 2024 - London - 2
The London Underground's calm yet firm voice reminds passengers to "mind the gap between the train and the platform." Though small, this gap is potentially perilous, a fitting metaphor for the growing chasm between traditional education systems and the rapid technological advancements transforming our world. This analogy helped me form my thoughts when commuting from my hotel to the QEII conference center in Westminster.
Like a speeding train, technology moves with urgency and purpose, constantly reshaping industries and lives. Education, in contrast, is the platform—steadfast but static, struggling to adapt. This metaphor encapsulates a profound issue in our global education landscape: an inability to match the speed and trajectory of technological progress, leaving students stranded, institutions at risk, and faculty often outpaced by their learners.
The Generation Gap in Digital Literacy
At a recent session during the QS Reimagine Education Conference in London, a speaker confidently suggested that universities should teach students how to use AI. My immediate reaction? Naive at best, outright offensive at worst.
I doubt he can use his smartphone efficiently to send and receive messages.
His argument assumes listeners are naive enough to miss the glaring irony: students are already mastering AI tools on their own, while many faculty and administrators remain woefully behind in digital literacy. This suggestion feels like a convenient deflection—a way to sidestep the deeper, foundational problems plaguing education. Why are these issues ignored? Because addressing them would challenge the status quo, risking the comfort zones of those who benefit most: the gatekeepers of education who prioritize their status, salaries, and fundraising efforts over genuine transformation.
Ironically, these same individuals are often invited as keynote speakers to imagine a world without universities. Their response is predictable: Absolutely not! It’s terrifying! We won’t let it happen. But perhaps these are precisely the voices that need to be excluded when reimagining education. It’s like inviting your parents along to a honeymoon planning session with your spouse—well-meaning, perhaps, but utterly misplaced in vision and priorities.
Compounding this is the presence of old scholars who actively resist technological advancements, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Their mindset is stuck in antiquated practices: printing PDF files, annotating them by hand, scanning, and emailing them back. These behaviors are symbolic of an inability—or refusal—to adapt. They cling to Freire’s concept of “banking education,” where teaching is reduced to depositing information into passive learners, oblivious to the dynamic possibilities modern tools offer.
A Collision Course
Before continuing this section, I want to clarify that I am not at all worried about the future of universities. Their formal structures, and formal education in general, have never been my primary concern. While I have often been excluded from these systems for various reasons, I can’t say I feel I’ve missed much—nor do I believe that the majority of those who pass through them gain as much as they claim.
What truly interests me is the current state of transformation. I see the emergence of new structures—more inclusive, purpose-driven, and innovative—that have the potential to reimagine what universities and academies could and should be.
If universities fail to evolve, they risk catastrophic consequences. Imagine a magnificent station without train tracks: the structure might endure, but its purpose would collapse.
Initially, I thought this issue was universally catastrophic, but conversations, such as one with Gabriel Rosso from Yale’s School of Management, proved enlightening. Certain institutions and disciplines remain at the forefront of innovation.
Elite universities like Harvard and Yale, with billions in endowment, operate like mosques or churches—they don’t need to change and, frankly, often don’t care to. They have no capacity or interest in innovation and will likely survive intact (though I hope not). Harvard is a prime example.
In contrast, hundreds of thousands of mid-tier institutions are on the brink. Their survival depends on relentless student recruitment, a process now contaminated with marketing language. Universities recruit students like customers, reducing education to a profit-driven enterprise. This commodification of learning devalues its transformative purpose and places these institutions in precarious positions as they struggle to navigate a changing educational landscape.
Bridging the Gap
However, the future is not without hope for universities. We are on the verge of emerging alternatives—models that hearken back to academia's original purpose of fostering inquiry, advancing knowledge, and enriching societies. At the QS Reimagine Education Awards and Conference, it was clear that innovative solutions are sprouting, often from outside the traditional university framework. That is the case for most successful students of any university.
Yet, business schools are troublingly dominant at such events. These schools are often at the center of discussions, steering the conversation toward skills, competencies, marketing, and revenue generation. While business as a discipline is essential, business schools are arguably the least significant regarding broader educational impact. Their focus on profit and alignment with job markets starkly contrasts the mission of universities as spaces for critical thinking and the pursuit of truth.
Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.
—Jacques Barzun (Historian)
Business schools are the wealthiest and most influential institutions in academia, yet their contribution to the fundamental goals of education pales in comparison to their financial success. This disparity diminishes the broader impact of conferences like QS Reimagine Education, reducing them to hubs of monetized skill-building rather than forums for rethinking education’s purpose.
Mind The Gap Between The Train and The Platform
The voice in the Underground reminds us of the danger in unattended gaps.
Bridging the gap between traditional academia and the rapid pace of technological and social change requires bold action. We must rethink how institutions function, prioritizing agility and inclusivity over bureaucracy and profit. Emerging alternatives—whether in the form of innovative startups and social enterprises, online learning platforms, or collaborative knowledge ecosystems—are the harbingers of this shift.
These models promise to realign education with its true purpose: cultivating minds, advancing knowledge, and enriching lives. But the journey will require challenging entrenched hierarchies, embracing innovation, and—most importantly—placing students and learning at the center.
The train is already moving. The question is whether today’s universities will build the tracks or be left behind, stranded on the platform of irrelevance.
In conclusion, I want to express a sentiment: University leaders resemble clerics from established religions during the Enlightenment. They approach issues with a sense of entitlement, which is quite unfortunate.