Saturday, October 22, 2016

Centre of Applied Innovation at Melbourne Polytechnic - My Mission Statement


For over 250 years, the notion of education has been organized around two dominant consensus memes: economics and social aesthetics.  The former has sought to craft a population that both confirms the industrial hierarchy of consumption-based social engagement in which production and consumption (and the agencies thereof) require order and acquiescence.  The latter has been concerned with the preservation of dominant and marginal expressions of catechisms and constrained creativity.  The former assumes the manipulation and management of elemental and energetic forces for socially approved and ratified experiences.  The latter appeals to the narrowly defined “five senses” which seek to constrain human perception into tactile, acoustic, visual, olfactory, and oral experiences.  Defined by “laws” and “metrics” and by the oddly selected 5/12ths of the cranial nervous roots, education has served as the technology to construct resource and sensory consensus into which individuals within the community find their identity.
With the advent of telecommunications-enabled sensory plurality and the diminution and extinction of resource-based labor models of social order, the economic justification of education has been indicted with the majority of tertiary and post-graduate education failing to retain relevance for rent-based labor pursuits.  And with the heterogeneity and mobility of humanity, the consensus social aesthetics have been indicted with the rapid devolution of sanctioned creativity and social dogma. 
As a result, the opportunity presents to consider a new paradigm in education in which: sensory perception is integrated and expanded; synthetic analytics are refined and tested; and, social integration is aligned towards purposeful engagement.  In other words, what we seek to foster is not a working class to serve the productive and consumptive needs of rent-based consumer industrialism but rather a fully interactive participant in the social enterprise that can create, assimilate, and critique dynamic ecosystems and contribute in an accretive fashion to society. 
To that end, we are building a transformative model of education which is explicitly designed to equip the learner-citizen to have the elasticity and malleable traits to thrive in a rapidly adapting ecosystem.  Rather than relegating individuals based on social, economic, class, ethnic, or cultural taxonomies, our explicit objective is to maximize the integrated capabilities of each learner-citizen to offer maximal utility to the community.  To accomplish this, our programs are designed to:
1.Develop ecosystem IQ to increase the sensory perception and resilience of learners;
2.Develop pluralistic models of adaptive engagement both with the persistent ecosystem as well as social forms and pursuits;
3.Appropriately synthesize legacy knowledge of culture (science, technology, social and physical engineering, and metrics);
4.Clearly articulate value in its exchange for physical and experiential pursuits;
5.Architect and deploy models to enable consensus experiences; and,
6.Maximize the optionality of engagement at liberty in generative and respectful practices.

Moving from the Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill paradigms of rentier, industrialist and laborer to a model of intelligent integrated participant, our efforts will be experiential, participatory, and relevant.  And using our state of the art intelligence, analytical, and application systems, our learner-citizens will be able to apply their learning to pursuits ranging from traditional industries to transformative social impact.  


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Thank you for your comment. I look forward to considering this in the expanding dialogue. Dave