Return to Engaged Textual Learning

Abstract

A relative decline of quality in higher education has been rampant the world over. Hardly has this been a problem confined to new institutions or to some countries alone. Massification, privatization and commercialization of higher education with the entailing proliferation of colleges and universities have accounted for the general decline in the standard of courses, teachers, learners, academic resources, infrastructure, evaluation and objectives. Democratization of higher education is mandatory for the contemporary economy and hence the unprecedented pressure to scale the number of learners to the highest possible. This challenge has been accounting for an obsessive search for various teaching methods and effective learning. Under the same economic pressure, we are almost at a loss today to define what serious learning means. It becomes necessary to remind ourselves that real learning is not remembering facts but understanding passionately and deeply to own and control knowledge. Passionate learners need neither teachers nor methods, for they are what the latter seeks to achieve. Teachers owe methods to the ways of passionate learners.