The latest issue of European Business Forum contains a series of short articles that address the question ‘Is European education fit for purpose?‘. I found it interesting as a background information to consider in a programme development context.
Recently I have come a accross a number of articles that do criticise what universities (or business schools) have to offer to management education. Many of these contributions are responding to Henry Mintzberg’s Managers Not MBAs. We are apparently not getting it right. What I am missing in this debate is the idea of questioning and developing a critical approach — something that is not fit neatly into the category of “tools and techniques”. Every curriculum must certainly teach what is relevant to industry, but there should also be time and space to question the assumptions of these approaches – together with the students.
In this current issue of EBF, Boulton and Lucas* remind us of the role of universities:
‘Crucially, universities provide the setting in which young people are taught to question, to reduce the chaos of information to the order of analytical argument, to seek out the relevant, to identify problems for themselves, and to resolve them by rational argument supported by evidence’.
Árni Halldórsson
*Geoffrey Boulton and Colin Lucas in European Business Forum, Issue 30, Autumn 2007, p. 24.
Interestingly, your point is entirely missing in the latest curriculum development article I read (Osseo-Asare et al., 2007, “Managerial leadership for total quality improvement in UK higher education”, The TQM Magazine, 19 (6), 541-560) which focuses on core processes and the relationship between efficiency and effectiveness. No word of what the aim of studies would be in general… I guess this is the main point one might easily miss out on when working in curriculum development. Nice to get a reminder
Gyöngyi