In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.
Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
The world is ruled by letting things take their course.
It cannot be ruled by interfering.
Tao Te Ching, 48
Translation Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English1
Sweet memories
When I started as teacher at the UT, about five years ago, I reorganized my home office, and stumbled on a syllabus on algebraic structures, which I studied in my first year as a mathematics student. Back then in the eighties, we did not have fancy books, pencasts, Kahn Academy, Youtube, Kahoot. This syllabus, handwritten by Bert Jagers, was very condensed, containing only the essence of the course material and some exercises without answers or solutions.
Algebraic structures was a very fundamental, abstract and difficult course. Yet I was hooked from page 1. The material was very condensed, but because the teacher radiated in class that he was enthusiastic about and fully competent in the topic this was no problem at all. Although I had to struggle a lot, time seemed not to exist. Often, I started reading and trying to reproduce proofs and lines of reasoning, delighted if I could solve an exercise that I couldn’t for days, and discover at some point that several hours had passed without notice.
I didn’t do anything, but I did all that was needed to easily pass the exam.
The UTQ
As newly appointed teacher at the University of Twente, I had to obtain my University Teaching Qualification, the UTQ. In order to fulfill the requirements, you have to provide evidence for five competencies: designing or redesigning teaching, teaching and supervising, assessment, evaluating teaching and professionalization. For each competence, a number of learning objectives is specified (in total 15), each with a number of required pieces of evidence (a bit more than 40 overall).
A UTQ is a guarantee that you can teach with sufficient quality. The expected time-investment is about 160 hours, and the process is specified in great detail. Pursuing the UTQ is experienced with mixed feelings by many teachers. I wonder whether Bert Jagers had to know all of this when he wrote his syllabus.
We can assume that the UTQ aims to educate teachers to function optimally in the educational system. Otherwise, what’s the point in making this a mandatory requirement for university staff? So what does the set-up of the UTQ tell us about this system?
One of the main essential points is the design of the learning activity. You have to specify learning objectives (output of the teaching process), and the required pre-knowledge (raw materials); how you reach the learning objectives (description of the process: how to turn raw materials into products), including continuous monitoring of the (production) process; how you test them (quality control of output, rejection of products that do not comply); how you assess the teaching process (optimise the production process, comparison of input/output ratio); how your learning activity fits into the bigger framework of the whole program.
It seems that the current set-up of education resembles that of a production line. Students come in, graduated students come out, rejected students might retry or drop out. Starting from the highest level, this structure is repeated recursively until course level, even until the level of individual lectures.
Ultimately, it is a consequence of how we, as society, have organised education. In essence, we specified and end-product, pay institutions on the basis of how many products (graduates) they deliver, and let them compete on the market for raw materials (students). The quality seal (diploma) serves as an entry gate for students to the next level in society.
Currently, we observe tension and stress amongst many students. This might be an indication that this model does not fit the demands of modern times. We are very good at streamlining the educational process – but are we doing the right things?
Tension
In 2019, I did not pass the UTQ. But the blame could be on my side, since I did not deliver the required number and format of all the pieces of evidence. In 2022, after a lot of procrastination, I did another attempt, where I put in all the work, and filled all the rubric points. I did a lot.
I did not pass directly. Instead, I got feedback, and had the opportunity to amend my hand-in.
Most of the feedback points did not refer to concrete improvements or shortcomings of the courses that I used as evidence; rather they pointed towards non-compliance to the rubric, or non-alignment with literature from educational science. My supervisor apologized that she had not prepared me better for this – referring to a flaw in the educational process, which should be streamlined next time.
Implementation of the feedback still has to be done. Of course, this raises the question why I cannot pull myself together and jump through this hoop? Intuitively, I feel quite a resistance against the utter formalization of the educational process. For me it feels like a quality control process in manufacturing. But if that is the governing attitude towards education, why not adapt?
I guess, this situation might feel familiar to many students. You want to get a degree (otherwise, as is current main opinion, you’re lost in life), and you have to accomplish all kinds of things that cost you a lot of effort. You have to do many retries, procrastinate, pull all-nighters to meet deadlines and what not. Education leads to a lot of tension and stress; but why not simply do what you have to do, get over with it, take it from there? Here is a model that is – in various shapes and forms – widely used by life coaches and spiritual leaders that sheds some light on the origin.
The essence and triple P
Each of us was born as a curious new being, eager to explore the world. You had your own passion, drive, curiosity, things you want to do; not because someone has told you, but because it’s just you. Let’s call this your essential self, or internal flame.
Yet, you were utterly helpless as a newborn. So, you started to manipulate your environment, and gradually discovered how you could obtain your food and care, without which you wouldn’t survive. Later, you discovered that you are part of a bigger community, and that it could be beneficial and fun to play and work together with peers. Then you developed the tools to acquire a position in society by following education and learned how to adapt to culture.
These tools could be called your social self 2. It contains the imprints of the triple P: Parents, Peers, and Professors. Your social self enables you to become a respected member of a community.
Ideally, it also enables your essential self to express itself in that community. Then the energy of your “internal flame” is aligned with the energy around you, and you feel energized by the interaction between you and your environment. All things take their course, and the world seems to wrap around you.
Sabotage
However, if you have a strong social self, and the community surrounding you demands things that block your internal flame too much, your essential self will sabotage whatever you have to do. Despite your social self’s attempts to bridge the gap, you will exhibit behavior that is considered unacceptable by the community you are in. You procrastinate, forget appointments, make serious mistakes, perform under par, etc. This is not accidental. It is initiated by your essential self, to protect itself. To protect you from losing personal integrity.
If you try to achieve something “because of” something, e.g. because you want a better position / more money / higher status, you have to spend a lot of effort to get it – and it wil lead to much more work once you get it. If you want to get a “pass with excellence” because it looks good on your transcript, but the topic does not at all align with your internal flame, you have to work extremely hard – and it will ultimately not help you, because you forget what you were pretending to have learned.
Letting go
Persisting in activities that compromise your essential self is a typical consequence of an overdeveloped social self. Somewhere in your past, the social self has developed capabilities to help you survive. However, often they are not effective anymore, because the circumstances have changed. Whereas you learned as a baby that smiling to your caretakers give you food, later in life it might not be effective to please your parents by studying physics if everything in you wants to become an artist.
Each of you is shaped to become utterly successful. But no one can specify for you in what manner and in which environment. Remove all the things that do not comply to your essential self, and you “rule the world”. You don’t need to be afraid that you will end up in lethargy: your inner flame will flow freely, explore out of curiosity, and you take on things that align better. Let go, until you do nothing, and you will leave nothing undone.
The role of education: explore and un-choose
Now we return to the setup of education. Long ago, we specified the gates that students have to pass to enter the next level in society, and we designed a process that they have to comply to. Does this still align to the internal flame of the new young generation? Many young students express a desire to live a meaningful life, and feel an urgency to repair the planet and clean up the mess our generation made of it. I hear complaints that students cannot focus, don’t want to work hard; I think this is not true. I think they want to work extremely hard, but on those things that they consider meaningful. They want to have direct impact, and are in search of how.
Current challenges are complex, and mitigating requires an interplay between (scientific) analysis and creation, which are different types of mental activities; and it requires collaboration between individuals with widely varying backgrounds, skills and knowledge. The separation between knowledge institutes and problem-owners in society needs to be reduced further.
I think we need to create next-generation educational institutes that are in fact communities of learners, where the more experienced learners (“teachers”) concretely work together with stakeholders from society on the mitigation of pressing problems, and where other, less experienced, learners (“students”) can participate in a protected environment.
As an example, staff could be working on the feasibility and long-term strategy options for a municipality to implement autonomous pods for public transport, where students would work alongside the staff in a joint and/or parallel project. This should address this issue in the full breadth, covering technology, business, social acceptance, regulations and governance, sustainability, et cetera.
This forms an excellent playground for students to discover what suits their interest – both content-wise and with respect to the types of role they want to take. The concrete embedding in society can give students the satisfaction to contribute in a meaningful way already from day one of their study. Furthermore, it lends credibility to education: teachers practice what they preach.
From time to time, also more experienced people both from outside and inside of the institute, could join the institute for some time, to broaden their horizon by working on problems of a different type than before, while simultaneously bringing a different mix of knowledge, skills and attitude. This could be a concrete implementation of the concept of “life long learning”.
In such educational environment, instead of “students in”, “graduates out”, the process would be oriented towards “problems in”, “solutions out”. Some students might want to stay longer than others, and might want to explore more or different things than others. Rather than “passing” a final exam, students could build a portfolio, as a testimony of what they did, and any portfolio is fine3.
The future role of education could be to offer students just a rich environment, where they can explore and discover what they find relevant, so what aligns to their essential self, and how they can realise that. While simultaneously they can get guidance in letting go, discovering and un-choosing things that do not align, and refraining from behavioural patterns in their social selves that are not helpful anymore.
This view on education might be considered a bit futuristic now. But there are already some developments in that direction, like the emergence of citizen science, the ubiquitous availability of knowledge, accelerated through AI, and micro and informal credentials like winning a Kaggle competition. By the way, some of the best engineers I have worked with have dropped out of the traditional educational system.
Towards doing nothing in education
The approach to education described above cannot be easily realized under current educational law. To qualify as higher education, an institution must provide evidence that students get a “bachelor level” at the end. Which implies that there must be tests and assessments in between, to make the program “studyable”. Which implies the whole quality control shebang, including tests, assessments, organizing retakes, appeals, handling personal circumstances, accommodating non-nominal students, checking fraud, et cetera. We do a lot in education …
But maybe we can make a step in the right direction. Can we find the boundaries of what is allowed, and design at least some parts of the program as “rich environment”, where students and teachers work alongside each other? How can we get our education more fluidly ingrained in society? How can we educate with society, rather than for society?
Maybe we can strip more than we currently think. Doing less and less, until nothing is done.
Epilogue
As a final word, I want to express my gratitude that I could participate in the UTQ process. It made me reflect on teaching, and made me realize that on a deepest level I struggle with the approach to teaching as expressed in the UTQ requirements.
Thanks to Lao-Tsu, who was able to express an approach to life in a few lines. And special thanks to Bert Jagers, who showed me that when the teacher’s and student’s interests align, you don’t need fancy study material.
Finally: the contents of this piece only represent my personal thoughts and opinion, and not necessarily aligns to those of my employer, University College Twente.
- https://www.eheart.com/TAO/TTC/TTCchapters-small.pdf, retrieved May 12, 2023 ↩︎
- I encountered the terms social and essential self in a book by Martha Beck, “The way of integrity”, The Open Field, 2021. The model per se, with a core self and its surrounding self is very common. ↩︎
- This is a fundamental difference with the current educational system, that is based on learning goals, including a quality assurance system that all students reach these goals. It represents my essential self’s resistance against the UTQ. ↩︎