2015-09-19 22:10:02
Start of course at university. Among the many problems that are crowding the table, I want to point out a rarely addressed issue: today the University is increasingly a structure that is devitalized, with precision surgery, as the dentist devitalizes a tooth: separate campuses, so that people can accept. too much – that they should be organized -, of course and that the program is hypertrophied and in many cases useless – so that students actually do not have time to lift their heads from books or computers, it is not necessary -, the stimulation of uncontrolled competition by a tenth of a field, the absence of fields for the analysis of social reality … anything so that there is no time for debate, to think, to understand what the role of the student is, of the professor is modern society. . A role, which is not for nothing, but which appears increasingly precarious and survive some moments of reality.
It will contradict me that we are not in difficult situations of Francoism or revolution, and we are not here to waste time. But although any historical comparison is complex, there is no doubt that our society has serious problems. And what we cannot allow is for the university to become a mere soulless degree management institution, something completely disconnected from the problems of the society in which it is located.
In today’s society, the training program for students is increasingly determined by companies, with planning around their short-term business interests. So, as Savater writes, soon instead of saying that so-and-so is an engineer, we will say that he is “siemens” or “a chair”… and as he adds with serious criticism, he will not know. say that so-and-so is a psychiatrist, but what is “pfizzer”, “novartis”…
A caricature of this situation is the so-called “Hamburger University” created by McDonald’s, which has 250,000 students and dozens of universities on five continents. There are already more than 2,000 universities of this type, linked to companies, such as Coca-Cola, around the world. There is no objection to hamburger training centers that are highly funded and run by companies that follow the interests of their shareholders. But is that a university? Is it a university example we want?
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