Ideas for Improving Global Education: The Ideal University and Corruption in Academia
An alternative education is necessary for humanity at the present moment. One reason for this is that schools generally teach values that are nationalistic rather than international.
For example, war is morally blamed on others, such as other nations besides one’s own. Through the teachings, one’s own country becomes the victim of attacks from outsiders, and outsiders are characterized as victimizers, invaders and potential invaders in the history textbooks. Some of the history textbooks in some nations actually portray slavery in their society as manual laborers.
The education thereby undermines the brutality, and it belittles the mentalities of the slavers and profiteers from the slave trade as if they were merely employers and salespeople.
Basically, the country’s values become nationalistic by undermining their own shortcomings and shifting blame to other nations. The people become less and less critical about their government’s origins and history, including the history of racial, religious, poverty-stricken, sex, national origin and cultural discriminations that have led to genocidal violence and terror, including state terror. State terror is where the military or law enforcement or governmental secret agencies systematically threaten groups of people and use violence against them more than other groups, which is based on race, age and sex. This creates groups who have more frequent and more intense fear of law enforcement, giving them systematic disadvantages, according to social dominance and system justification sociologists.
Also, the mass media is owned by overly wealthy elites (that is, billionaires and other major stockholders) who are overly concerned with protecting their short-term best interests and corporate, political and military strongholds.
So, education has been morphed into textbooks and teachings that portray one’s own society as having morally good corporate, political, military and legal systems that are fairer to others, safer and wiser than others. One’s own society is portrayed in these fictitious ways, which would be overshadowed or cast into doubt by another country’s portrayal of one’s own country, depending on their relations.
The general education of any nation often serves more to create a national pride. Also, this pride is something that is usually not shared with immigrants. So, immigrants, for instance, are placed at enormous disadvantages insofar as they often must do the academic work in another country but as a second or third language they learn.
The consequences of being taught a set of lies without revealing the truth of vast injustice, idiotic blunders and unsafe conditions in one’s own society is we are likelier to repeat the same sorts of mistakes of naive optimism and of a national viewpoint of favorable appearances. The consequence of being indoctrinated with artistic shaded view with national pride is that the critical thinking and self-examination of the learners are stifled.
In America, several corporations get a large portion of their funding from governmental contracts, especially for war-related activities, technologies, goods and services. Educators are required to teach the same materials that have often been manipulated to suit the predicted best interests of the corporate, political and military power elites.
Universities have been overrun with administrative workers, public relations spokespeople and other corporate obligations because funding is given and directed toward these means. Political think tanks are also undermining the abilities for universities to hire people and teach values of sustainability, international collaboration, safety, efficiency and fairness at workplaces.
Universities have fallen into the trap of consumerism and materialism. Consumerism and materialism are changing universities’ goals from producing educated critical thinkers to producing clients for themselves from whom they can profit and send into the workforce as obedient workers who refrain from questioning the practices of their employers.
Universities have realized that there is a labor demand to teach on campus or online, especially part-time work. Then, they began lowering the salaries to be based on the number of classes that some university teachers teach. They expanded their faculties, but with more employees at lower ranks with very low compensation who often only teach very few classes and have no health, retirement or fringe benefits.
Consider the ideal university to be one that teaches both life skills for survival, sustainability, conservation and maintenance of resources as well as critical thinking, logic and research skills with ethics via habitual practice.
The ideal university teaches people how to think instead of what to think. For example, it teaches: If A, then B. If B, then C. So, if A, then C. That is, the arguments it teaches are valid, and the university focuses less on the facts that vary in their importance so learners and teachers form their own educated and rational opinions about the varying levels of priority that certain facts have.
Ideally, the university is a place that is mutually beneficial for the natural environments that surround it. It should use natural materials with geothermal properties that allow for rooms to be cooled by the earth (e.g., through earth tubes) and from the materials themselves that cool down overnight for summer months and heat up the rooms during the day for winter months.
The ideal university constructs its buildings at angles that take advantage of the sun light during the winter and that offer efficient relief during the summer with plant life as shade. The lighting is mostly natural. The energy-use is economic. Comfort, safety and efficiency are combined elements of the architecture, which is affordable as public education. There are fruit trees on campus with fruit that is free for students, faculty, staff and guests.
An ideal university is one where each student can express any idea, whether it is ethical or racist or sexist or ageist or intelligent and ethical. The reason for this is quite simple: Any racist, ageist or sexist should be able to express the ideas so that others know what he or she thinks and so that the person can then be avoided or shunned and face the consequences for his or her immoral discrimination. Discriminators should face the consequences of the unethical ways in which they form their beliefs (See Ethics of Belief).
The ideal university grants access to all of its library sources and seeks to gain and distribute more via technologies. This entails students being given electronic libraries with MILLIONS OF BOOKS and articles that are ordered in ways that facilitate research. Each student, faculty and staff member deserves his and her own electronic libraries with access to millions of books in the languages that each one wants. However, unfortunately, this practice has not been implemented and most universities only grant access to their small amount of materials.
The reason why most universities have access to only small amounts of library materials is that corporations profit immensely from expensive journals and books via denying access to electronic books and articles and illegalizing book and journal printing services. To the profiteers, the writings and much of the editing is submitted for free for the use of the profiteers! They receive the work and charge for access to it and file lawsuits against those who upload it for free access for everyone.
On the contrary, the ideal university spreads its ideas far and wide by publishing them and publishing the ideas of the writers and speakers and other expressers at the university.
The ideal university is one that discourages excessive consumerism and materialism and replaces these ideologies with sustainability, cleanliness in nature, conservation and maintenance. Such a university works toward the production of its own products for its own people, such as food, shelter and clothing with habitual sustainable practices.
The ideal university is critical of the destructive groups and organizations and the wasteful, especially including the power elites with corporate, military and political positions of employment. It is doubtful of the elites’ intentions and messages, and the ideal university places moral and legal blame on the power elites constantly for their action and inaction. These elites, of course, are the ones who decide over the direction of work and job tasks of thousands and thousands of employees.
The ideal university treats its lowest level of employee fairly, and the amount and type of labor and overall value to the university that this employee gives is respected with a fair salary with benefits. That is, there is less bureaucracy and more teaching. Also, the expansion of the ideal university depends upon its self-assessment of the overall value that it adds to the region and at the international level (i.e., since the global education system is able to publish with immediate access that is international). The ideal university does not expand itself merely because there is an increase in the demand of its productivity, or because more students, faculty or staff want to work there. The ideal university expands itself only to add to and replace those members of its community who make real, measurable and memorable contributions to it constructively.
Practices that Undermine Global Education
When people discriminate in immoral ways and feel the need to hide their thoughts, others are placed in danger. Nonetheless, with increases in academic fraud during the 21st century, universities are acting more like corporate enterprises with public relations employees who aim to cover up and shift public attention away from the actions of their students and faculty members.
With the scandals at the major universities with regard to the entrance of students with scores that would ordinarily be too low to attend, the major scandal is not the entrance of students from wealthy families, but rather the scandal is that they are able to pass their courses and gain credits for each class, each semester and each year. That is, the media has covered up the most important aspects of the scandal, which is an overall decline in the integrity of evaluators as teachers and professors.
With the increasing ease of buying essays online, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of these purchased essays as homework for credit in schools and universities. Each phase of the education process has been corrupted by these questionable businesses. These businesses work in the gray market and have anonymous owners who sell homework around the world, including high school homework and university entrance essays to homework in almost every academic discipline and even masters and doctoral dissertations.
For example, consider that the global fake diploma industry has become a billion dollar industry (Havocscope, 2021). From this it follows that there is an obscene amount of unfair and excessive competitiveness in the labor market for positions of employment, which includes the universities and schools. Professors and students often pay for their research to be completed by others, which undermines education systems since false authorship provides the wrong person as the responsible one for the dissemination of ideas.
This is systematic contract cheating because there are contracts that the ghostwriters sign as well as the buyers of ghostwriters’ works. These contracts discourage ghostwriters from revealing and informing the public of the false authors who cheat by using their work. This is particularly dangerous in the applied sciences (e.g., medicine and engineering). Would you want a medical doctor operating on you, a friend or family member who had a large amount of research and publications written by ghost authors?
The ideal school or university is one that can evaluate the skills of the learners in ways that demand them to perform with critical thinking. Learners must be allowed to demonstrate their knowledge in the form of performances, especially of some of the basic skills necessary for each discipline: Reading, writing, listening comprehension, researching and speaking.
Also, students should be proud of their work and proud enough to publish it. Students who write essays should publish them, and if they are plagiarized, they should face the consequences, which is to withdraw the credits for those classes, or, as in the case of the former Minister of Defense of Germany and former President of Hungary, they should have their degrees rescinded completely.
Global education is also undermined by the legal denial of access to large electronic libraries with free access to books and articles. The major publishing houses (that is, Elsevier, Springer and Wiley Blackwell) extract the work of university professors and others for free, and then they sell their work to libraries. They use the legal system to sue organizations that offer free access to knowledge, or they buy the organization and charge either the authors to publish or charge the clients to gain access to publications.
Recently, William Brant at ECC was sent a false invitation to publish for an academic organization. After examining the content of the message and the format for the publication, he realized that the organization would charge $500 if his writings were accepted for publication. So, it was not at all an invitation to publish something, but rather a false invitation.
If others undergo the experience of receiving such deceptive advertising, it is questionable what other types of deceptive trade practices that organization is making. Also, it is noteworthy that such an organization stifles the productivity of academics by causing them to reorganize their plans, especially their plans for future publications.
