Abstract
The chapter discusses the effects of cube in education, that is, it contextualises the argument presented in Chap. 8 to a case study of the newly approved higher educational laws in Poland. As it turns out, the existing critical geometry which describes the current mainstream organisational culture of the university is grounded in the pyramid, thereby reinforcing vertical (hierarchical) relations. The argument develops towards suggesting an alternative cube-based decision-making culture within the academic institution, that is, Sustainable Decision Management System (SDMS). While respecting hierarchy as the inherent element of university structure, SDMS instead invites more democratic or transversal forms of organisation that combine vertical and horizontal management, thus ensuring balance in the system. The discussion closes with the applications of the Square–Cube Law in the field of education, along with the arising implications.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for example, https://mysticalnumbers.com, accessed on 28 August 2018.
- 2.
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/education, accessed on 28 August 2018.
- 3.
The current discussion may be a pretext to renegotiate at the level of the socio-political reality the actual validity of Montesquieu’s trias politica model, which is based on the checks and balances between the three branches of state governance: a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary. The model does not take into account the media, commonly felt to be a fourth branch. This feeling has a sound justification since the media order is often a matter of state-level decisions. In many countries, the media are bifurcated, similarly to education systems, into private and state-owned. The latter are under the control of the government, where the management of the state-owned TV and radio is formed as a result of political decision. The former do not stay neutral either, thereby actively engaging in political propaganda for or against the government, depending on the owner’s preferences. This issue, though intriguing by itself, is beyond the scope of the present book.
- 4.
The data cited herein were extracted from the British National Corpus, which is distributed by the University of Oxford on behalf of the BNC Consortium. All rights in the cited texts are reserved. The emphasis in the examples is added by the author to better illustrate the discussed cases.
- 5.
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Kuźniak, M. (2021). Cube Effects in Education. In: The Geometry of Choice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78655-7_9
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