Education is Deeply Dysfunctional

I want to suggest that education, particularly higher education, is deeply dysfunctional.

There’s been a lot of work and a lot of thinking about school education which is very, very valuable and people like Ken Robinson have really been pushing some ideas about creativity at school level.

But at the same time I find that higher education is becoming more like schools, and not just more like schools today but more like the worst sort of Victorian school from 200 years ago.

And as designers we get this, we have all these interesting conversations about inter-disciplinary, and cross-disciplinary working. Service design crosses all theses different areas – within my institution, which is quite small, there’s at least four schools that would lay claim to and do work in service design. But trying to have a conversation with them together, it just falls over. Cross-disciplinary working all sounds great, but then when it comes to trying to implement some of it we somehow become paralysed. We have conversations, “Ah... yeah, we have got the structure of the Masters sorted and it's accredited now, but our students in management have a different set of credit points to the ones in design...” It's all deeply boring, but it’s also very, very real.

My question is, how do we walk our talk? How do we move from talking about all of this – talking about all of this external projects – and apply it to ourselves, and manage not to become totally paralysed by all of the kind of structural problems that seem to get in the way.

It seems to be that we can apply these things to some really interesting projects, we can look at cities as Ezio Manzini just pointed out, and yet within our institutions it’s like we have just become dumb robots and slaves to the institution. Largely it might be a question of how you then sell that up to the people that need to be influenced.

To make an additional point, the sciences have done a very good job of promoting the value of science and the importance of science in education and the importance of science in culture. But is this slightly at the cost of anything else? It's as if science is the only way and scientific method is the only way of progression. I think that that has become very dominant in higher education, and we have to think of ways of making the balance once more.

Research fellow and Lecturer in Service Design at Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland. Andy co-founded award winning new media collective Antirom in London. He was also an experience designer at Razorfish prior to moving to Australia were he set up the interactive department of visual effects company, Animal Logic. Andy was also a senior lecturer in Interactive Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.