Higher Education and the Growth of Knowledge

<p>This book sketches the history of higher education in parallel with the development of science. Its goal is to draw attention to the historical tensions between the aims of higher education and those of science in the hope of contributing to improving the contemporary university. A helpful tool in analyzing these intellectual and social tensions is Karl Popper's philosophy of science demarcating science and its social context. Popper defines a society that encourages criticism as open and argues convincingly that an open society is the most appropriate one for the growth of science. A closed society on the other hand is a tribal and dogmatic society. Despite being the universal home of science today the university as an institution that is thousands of years old carries traces of different past cultural social and educational traditions. The book argues that by and large the university was and still is a closed society and does not serve the best interests of the development of science and of students' education.</p>