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My world view derives from empiricism, which explains a framework based on experimentation and evidence. Van Fraassen (1985) pointed out a profound statement made by a Philosopher, W. K. Clifford, that “it is always wrong for anyone anywhere to come to believe something on insufficient evidence”. For one to address what can be known, it is important to engage in discussions on epistemology, and seeking to establish truth in terms of logical consistency and empirical adequacy (Kelly, 1997). In order to understand our natural world, a system of inquiry (Merriam & Simpson, 1995), observation and experimentation needs to be carried out in order to make objective conclusions and interpretations of the world. This process is typical of natural sciences where laws, theories and principles are developed in order to provide utility to the forms of existence -time, matter and space.

Therefore, research to me is a that systematic inquiry which serves as a point of reference on the basis of which claims are established with verifiable evidence, rather than belief.

 

Reference

Kelly, G. J. (1997). Research traditions in comparative context: A philosophical challenge to radical constructivism. Science Education, 81(3), 355-375.

Merriam, S. B., & Simpson, E. L. (1995). A guide to research for educators and trainers of adults. Krieger Publishing Co., PO Box 9542, Melbourne, FL 32902-9542.

Van Fraassen, B. C. (1985). 11 Empiricism in the Philosophy of Science. Images of science: Essays on realism and empiricism, with a reply from Bas C. van Fraassen, 245.

The idea of the mechanistic view of the world was likened to a clock -made up of many interconnected components (pieces), which function as a whole (machine). To understand the machine, we have to understand the parts. Technically, this is a new way of understanding life, and the principle of interconnectedness could be applied to the way we see the world (as a machine). The same applies to the human body (as a machine), as well as other systems in the world such as politics and health system. In addressing the systems of the world, no problem should be treated in isolation due to the inter-relationship among the pieces.

An example was given from the health system, and the following chain of events is being observed: Cutting down trees in the rain-forest causes global warming, and using the cut down trees to build ranches for red meat could introduce some long terms effects. The effects include health conditions such as heart failure, and government spending on the production of artificial hearts. To illustrate this further, the following systemigram is used to depict the impact of cutting down trees on the economy. Continue reading “Mechanistic view”

It was an interesting experience observing the development of systemic depictions. First of all, I did not know there was such a tool used to model systems thinking. While the depictions were underway in class for student enrolment, what caught my interest was the way the links and nodes give new perspectives of the entire system, and it becomes easier to point out areas that need adjustment or modification -which is a flexible way of thinking.

The depictions remind me of “state-transition diagram” in automata theory, used for solving computational and engineering problems. The state corresponds each node, while the transitions corresponds to the link. I quite agree with the engineering approach used in educational systems design and engineering.

Having fully represented the system of interest, the relationships existing among the nodes became very clear and it was easy to identify potential problems. For example, in an attempt to establish equity and fair play, the links denote the behavior of the nodes with respect to other coordinating components. The number of items in a node could also suggest opportunities for modification and restructuring as needed. On the other hand, the depiction of student enrolment gives more insight to identifying causal and effect relationships, and helps to identify internal and external opportunities and threats. In addition, potential problems of the system could be deleted or redirected. I think SystemiTool affords great opportunities for effective design and redesign systems of interest.

 

The movie critically analyses the economic system in terms of how it has been subjected to series of crisis caused by misconstrued notion of investment, stability and unrealistic economic models. On the other hand, people want to make huge of amounts of money with little or no physical effort. While human factors impact on the economy, the effect is insignificant compared to the systemic failure to restructure the economic models and policies.

It is unfortunate that some of these economic issues are not taught in schools, and in most cases, the crisis takes people unawares. History is therefore important in order to avoid the mistakes of the past financial crisis. If we pay close attention to history, we will observe that recession is a natural phenomenon which is recurrent in any economy. A risk situation was the reckless lending of loans to people who could not afford to pay the mortgage, and this process is called subprime lending. For example, in 2004, over a third of mortgages required no verification of income, job or assets. Another risk situation is the layering of debt on debt where financial institutions owe other financial institutions. However, the critical risk situation occurs when people are caught up in the euphoria of a bubble of appreciating assets and speculations of an upward trend in the increase in value. Bubbles look attractive, but at the same time, could attract dangerous consequences such as an unexpected burst. Preparation is key to reducing the risk of crisis when speculation, which is gambling in disguise, fails.

When markets seem to be booming, we have a tendency of becoming blind and imagine that the economy will take care of itself without preparing for possible crisis. This is a potential trap which has been modeled into the neo-colonial economic theory, stating that all people are rational; the economy will always find itself at equilibrium; Bubbles simply can’t happen. This has been the popular rhetoric with promises and elegantly told stories.  However attractive the stories might be, it does not qualify to be an exclusive model for financial stability.

The nature of human beings in terms of judgment is quite complicated, and an effective approach to fixing the instability issues is a change in the organizational and strategic policies. Therefore, the focus should be on how to redesign the system such that it does not interfere with household funding.

As systems control opportunities for advancement, it is recommended that the systems go beyond their own interest, and support the change initiative through unbiased presentation on historical trends, and investment in the real economy of the 21^st century.

Boardman & Sauser (2008) identified “perspectives” as the fourth essence of systems engineering (SE). This is to say that individuals have different points of view in finding meaning in the thread of meaninglessness or finding meaning in the confusion of details. In most cases, perspectives could vary at extreme opposites such as Your east, my west; your cure, my poison; your choice, my constraint etc.

The systems engineer considers this paradox as insight into future worlds.

This raises the question of adaptability in systems engineering for increased value. The article on “School is a prison -and damaging our kids” by Peter Gray, explained that many successful entrepreneurs and innovators, such as Albert Einstein, said they hated school and learned despite it, not because of it. It follows that there was room for adaptability to pursue their desire to know and achieve stability.  However, the promise of stability by systems without provision for adaptability could lead to instability and crisis.

In the Boom Burst Boom film, the United States president was vociferous in 2008 about the growth of the economy, but shortly the recession hit, and crisis set in. Financial stability also causes people to be over-confident, especially when systems invest in the financial economy rather than the real economy.

The economy is a critical system which has been politically engineered and misguided by layering debt on debt (borrowing from one financial institution to pay another financial institution) and the forcing loans on people who may never pay them, and eventually get foreclosed. When people borrow cash to buy shares, in the name of investment, they do this in speculation that stocks go up so they can make profit. Systemically, this is not an investment, rather a speculation which could fail due to unforeseen circumstances such as the recession.

According to Zusman (2005), one of the major challenges facing higher education of the 21^st century is funding. The author further explained that the level of funding from the state for higher education increases when the state revenues are good. On the other hand, funding of higher education drops during the recession. Apart from the recession, inflation and growth in enrollment could also impact on the available funding. These uncertainties could lead to privatization of public schools in order to raise revenues. The privatization process may be partly or fully implemented across the sub-systems in the educational institution. Zusman (2005) pointed out that in some institutions, “high-demand, high-return professional programs like law or business, become fully or nearly fully funded by clients (students), business, or other private sources.” (p. 2).

Another way to support the higher education is to design a system in each institution which could serve as Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) in support of the funding needs of the larger system.

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Reference

Boardman, J., & Sauser, B. (2008). Systems thinking: Coping with 21st century problems. CRC Press.

Gray P (n.d) School is a prison and damaging our kids. Retrieved from  http://www.salon.com/2013/08/26/school_is_a_prison_and_damaging_our_kids/

Jones T. (2015) Boom Burst Boom. Retrieved from https://www.netflix.com/title/80097490

Zusman, A. (2005). Challenges facing higher education in the twenty-first century. American higher education in the twenty-first century: Social, political, and economic challenges, 2, 115-160.

Systems, are composed of parts or coordinating components. For example, the university system is made up of subsystems which could be campuses at different cities, and they grow organically extending to areas that have the potential for growth and resources. From a business perspective, competition always influences the growth in population and complexity of a system, and in some cases for the wrong reason.

Why then are the systems growing? Could the growth be profit oriented?

The growth should be as a result of what they have to offer, and the value of the offering. The expected goal of educational systems is to provide the corporations with high-quality workforce, and it is important to note how the schools ultimately impact on the performance of the corporations. In the first instance, new knowledge and practices from faculty research in universities are infused into the courses, thus improving the learning experience of the students. As a result, the students, who are future employees of corporations, are equipped with new knowledge which helps them perform better. This is the reason corporations pay taxes, and the bigger systems (such as the state) allocates resources to schools in order to provide high-quality labor to the corporations, which ultimately contributes to the sustainability of the corporation and the state.

The idea is to invest in education, which leads to better employees and better results for the corporations. Better results translate to better money and profitability. This chain of events model the supply chain system, where each stage is dependent on the previous in order profitably get to the next level and desired product, which is consumed by the corporation. By extension, the product becomes the input to the corporations.

Systems which provide the same products (students) are in constant competition for limited resources (funding), which could be artificially created by larger systems (the state) when there are cuts in the funding for education. Cutting back on funding could lead to schools engaging in larger intake of students, which could impact on quality of teaching and feedback given to students. As a result, the lowered quality of teaching also leads to lower quality of students in terms of what they are supposed to know in order to be effective at the workforce. Cuts on funding also means inadequate reward in a system, and this could lead to logistics issues and the option of switching programs and courses to be conducted fully online. Another impact of cuts on funding in schools is students moving out of state to schools of best offer. In most instances, the students may move on with their lives in the new state and not return.

This is where adaptability plays a key role. Systems need to be designed to be flexible and adaptive in order to survive unexpected situations. However, flexibility and adaptability should be in moderation. This is to say that systems that are too rigid are liable to break under extreme circumstances. On the other hand, systems that are too flexible may not have the tenacity to withhold its structure in extreme circumstances.

 

 

While interacting with colleagues in a higher institution, a senior colleague made a statement, which made a lot of sense to me, that “education is the only business where the customer is the product”. This is a profound reality if we are to look at education through the lens of business and marketing. It is therefore critical to re-engineer the system to take into consideration the activities that regulate the input, process and output of higher education institutions. Higher education constitutes a critical component in the society, but in most cases, does not live up to its own rhetoric (Barnett, 1997). The diverse nature of the coordinating components such as the divisions, discipline and culture, and the blending of capacity, infrastructure and content models a microcosm of the world. Per the words of Emile Durkheim, as referenced by Clark (1986), “it is rare to find an institution which is at once so uniform and so diverse…for it is only living things which can in this way, while fully retaining their identity, bend and adapt themselves to a whole variety of circumstances and environments” (p. xiv).

Adaptability therefore is fundamental in an evolving world, and should be the principle upon which higher education thrives. From a business perspective, the preparation of the products (students) for career should include efforts to equip students for career adaptability (Tolentino, Garcia, Lu, Restubog, Bordia, & Plewa, 2014).

I identify with higher education in the capacity of a growing researcher and doctoral student. My expression of bias is that it could be a waste of time and failure of a system to fulfill products that are not market ready, considering the trends in today’s market. There should be a dissolution of the frozen patterns of thought (Kofman & Senge, 1993), and the institution of collaborations between the market and the higher institutions to ensure that products are tailored to adapt to the demand of the evolving market.

It may not be a surprise if the objectivity of my thoughts are clouded. The reason could be that the administration may not be directly affected by the outcome, especially when the decision makers have little or no background in education (teaching and instruction) -not necessarily educational leadership.

 

Barnett, R. (1997). Higher education: A critical business. McGraw-Hill Education (UK).

Clark, B. R. (1986). The higher education system: Academic organization in cross-national perspective. Univ of California Press.

Kofman, F., & Senge, P. M. (1993). Communities of Commitment: The Heart of Learning Organizations. Organizational Dynamics, 22(2), 4-23.

Tolentino, L. R., Garcia, P. R. J. M., Lu, V. N., Restubog, S. L. D., Bordia, P., & Plewa, C. (2014). Career adaptation: The relation of adaptability to goal orientation, proactive personality, and career optimism. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 84(1), 39-48