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The Renaissance of Universities

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The Decline and Renaissance of Universities
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Abstract

Recovering Humboldt’s ideals into contemporary education policies is not enough. The new academic model must focus on both education of citizens and progress of knowledge in order to provide citizens capable of joining the community, instead of producing human resources at risk of rapid obsolescence and acute marginalization. Education should replace preparation for the labor market by restoring the intimate relationship between the student and the professor. To this effect flipped classroom and mastery, proper approaches to education in the ICT era, and continuing education should play a major role. The second challenge of the new model deals with the capability of penetrating the complexity of the world, which the traditional disciplinary approach can no longer even graze. From the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth century, the search for knowledge has been confined within narrow areas, a garden of forking paths that never merge. Transdisciplinarity is the main road to overcome the barrier that the disciplinary approach erects in every field, under the commitment of knowledge progress. The third challenge deals with establishing new democratic rules for university governance. Demarchy and mixed systems of voting and sortation are capable of establishing novel democratic rules.

Collaboration operates through a process in which the successful intellectual achievements of one person arouse the intellectual passions and enthusiasms of others.

Alexander von Humboldt

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Rosso, R. (2019). The Renaissance of Universities. In: The Decline and Renaissance of Universities. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-20385-6_5

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