Last year I taught a course on social movements at university. Using the hefty textbook, we discussed, with examples such as the climate movement, pro-life protests and Black Lives Matter, theories about why people organize themselves, how to classify social movements and how to measure their influence.
Under these conversations, impatience lurked. One student who was sometimes absent to chain herself up somewhere with Extinction Rebellion, or to march through the streets of Glasgow in protest against the climate crisis, put it in an outburst: ‘What a load of bullshit. The world is on fire, and we are here to interpret a local hair. Who’s going to get anywhere with that?’
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barbara Oomen is chair of the Zeeland HZ/UAS University of Applied Sciences and, in addition, a part-time professor at Utrecht University.
Farmers Defense Force
Deep in my heart I thought she was right. As a teacher, I also really tried to open the windows, such as during a guest lecture by Farmers Defense Force on straw bales in a farm outside Middelburg. Yet in my answer I explained to the student that this is simply the raison d’être of science education. Understanding, interpreting, theorizing, in order to transfer knowledge and sharpen the minds for a future social role.
I spoke to students like this much more often over the years. What good is the theory? Can’t we get to work much more practically? In fact, smart, committed students, full of social impatience, do not belong in academic education (wo) but in the other half of our higher education: higher professional education. This is for three reasons.
living lab
Firstly, a higher professional education student, within whichever study programme, does immediately start working in practice. Within logistics or in a living lab, in a food forest or a nursing home, a supermarket or a school. With social issues, because all Dutch universities of applied sciences committed themselves to the sustainable development goals of the United Nations and placed them at the heart of their education.
Secondly, the distinction between wo and hbo is blurring because universities of applied sciences have become more and more knowledge institutions in recent decades. With lecturers, research departments and from this year even a third cycle: the possibility to work on a doctorate for another four years after your master’s degree. Practice always comes first. Where in scientific research ‘valorisation’, the contact with practice, is often the last phase in a project, practice-oriented research starts with social questions.
Intellectual voyage of discovery
The urgency of these social questions is the third reason for this plea. The standard picture of a scientific study still consists of years of self-fulfillment coupled with an intellectual journey of discovery and then ever, well beyond, to get to work. However, the problems of our time, especially the climate crisis, are so urgent that you want to involve the very people who are most motivated to do something about them from their first year of study.
Despite the fact that pre-university education students who are looking for a relevant study with a direct connection to practice and the major challenges of our time should at least consider HBO, this is happening less and less. While at the turn of the century one in three pre-university students went to HBO, this is now one in five.
Puzzle
What’s behind that is a puzzle. Salaries, everywhere in higher education strongly determined by the specific education and not the type of study, are hardly different. The same goes for job opportunities. The level – higher education – is the same and abroad a bachelor counts as a bachelor, and a master as a master, regardless of whether it is from HBO or WO.
Perhaps the same thinking that I encountered so much when I made the switch from university to HBO this year: a very outdated image of vocational education and the misguided notion that university is ‘better’. While on more and more fronts, doing is the new thinking.
Binary System
Against this background, in a policy letter earlier this month, Minister Dijkgraaf drew attention to the strategic positioning of higher professional education and the importance of thinking through the binary system.
My plea, however, is aimed at all those pre-university students who often think in class: ‘What good is this to me?’ Who want to work extensively with social questions during their studies. Not as an extra activity, but as the core of the study. So come and have a look at the open days of the HBO. That is not only very good for the world, but also for yourself.