Higher Education or Higher Instruction? - Part 1 of 2 (Panel at IMCIC 2015)

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• published: 11 Jun 2015
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"Higher Education or Higher Instruction?" - Part 1 of 2 (Conversational Participatory Panel at IMCIC 2015) Panelists: Dr. Leonid Perlovsky, CEI of LP Information Technology, Northeastern University, USA / Previously Visiting Scholar at Harvard University Harvard University, and Principal Research Physicist at The Air Force Research Laboratory; Professor T. Grandon Gill, Director of the Doctorate in Business Administration, College of Business, University of South Florida, USA / Editor-in-Chief of Informing Science / Editor of the Journal of IT Education / Founding Editor of Journal of Information Technology Education; Dr. Jeremy Horne, President-emeritus, Southwest Area Division, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), USA / CEO of Inventor’s Assistance League, USA; Dr. Risa Blair, Kaplan University, United States; and Dr. Nagib Callaos, President of the International Institute of Informatics and Systemic, USA / Former Dean of Research and Development of the University Simon Bolivar, Venezuela / Founding Editor in Chief of the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. Abstract “Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” Albert Einstein “But education, in the true sense, is not mere instruction…It is unfolding the whole human nature. It is growing up in all things to our highest possibility” J. F. Clarke “By education I mean an all-round drawing out of the best in child and man-body, mind and spirit. Literacy is not the end of education or even the beginning.” Mahatma Gandhi The purpose of conversational is to differentiate between the notions of Education and Instruction, especially in the context of Higher Education, and to identify the kind of relationships that would make more effective the implementation of both of them. To confuse the meanings of these terms or what concepts and uses are involved in their respective notions might be the source of intellectual confusion, unintentional misleading, and, hence, of pragmatic ineffectiveness, especially with regards to educational processes. Our hope is to continue reflecting and researching on this issue and, potentially, generate reflections and research from teachers and professors specifically regarding what is (and/or what should be) the meaning of Higher Education, and its differences with what we might call Higher Instruction. An increasing number of scholars (consciously or unconsciously) perceive or conceive some universities as institutions of Higher Instruction rather than Higher Education. In the opinion of some of the panelist, there is an increasing confusion among the terms of “education” and “instruction” and sometimes they are used almost as synonyms. Both terms are much related, but they do not mean the same ideas or concepts. Let us the metaphor of “color” and “surface”, we know that both are completely different concepts though very related to each other. There is no color that is not seen on a surface and no empirical surface with no color on it, but to confuse the notions of “color” and “surface” might take us to a non-sense confusion between “Optics” with Geometry”. “Color” and “surface” should be differentiated as concepts or notions in order to understand the reality in which both of them co-exist together. To do so, we will not try to conceptually define “education” and “instruction.” This is not the place to do it, nor is it our intention. Furthermore, from a systemic perspective, as well as from a post-modernist stand, definition of education should be done in the context of a culture and/or value system. Consequently, the definition should be done by the users of specific educational systems and processes. This is why we worked out in another article a meta-definition of “Education,” i.e. we defined a way of producing a definition of education by means of the corresponding users (students, parents, teachers, etc). Our purpose in this conversational session is 1) to share and collect important denotations and connotations of the notions of “Education” and “Instruction” with the objective to differentiate them in order to effectively relate them; and 2) to provide the attendees with the option to write, after the conference is over, an invited position of reflection paper which, if accepted, will be included in the post-conference volume of the conference proceedings with no additional cost for the respective author(s). Best papers will be selected for their publication in the journal with no additional cost either for their author(s).