8. A meditation on global further education, in haiku form

Abstract

Universities take for granted and are taken for granted. Their specificity to the places in which they operate is often lost in the uniformity of ranking, global branding, and translatable structure. Political imperatives such as inequality, changing governments, and the growing awareness of a planet in peril do sometimes lead to structures-of-knowledge scrutiny. Most academics have little time for this, as they race in the hamster-wheels of neoliberal knowledge production and consumption. Yet knowledge has radically altered since the emergence of the internet as a tool of individual and collective thinking. The structures of learning, teaching and hierarchy that shape lives are struggling to make sense of the sudden change. This chapter is written in haiku form with the arguments elaborated in footnotes, engaging the reader's increasing skill at thinking on multiple levels at once, and posing questions of the present and future of education for good.