Higher Education vs. Higher Information:

What makes something worth learning is not just “how important it is” but “how well we understand it”. We become involved in what we understand, not simply in what is important. This is why we learn many unimportant things that we understand, even complex subjects which sound easy, as we have understood those!

Today’s educational systems often emphasize too much on importance and applications. But students are naturally drawn to something else “Understanding”.

This perspective is based on more than 20 years of my experience in research, industry and teaching at leading universities and research institutes, involving more than 1000 international students and supervision of more than 60 PhD and Master’s students. As well more than 7 years working on developing novel educational systems and conceptual approaches.

The reality:

👉 We cannot follow what we do not understand, no matter how important it is!

If we try to store 99% of a subject in memory without deeply understanding the key 1% of concepts and mechanisms, then our minds become filled with:

❌ Higher Information

✅ Not Higher Education

Higher Information: Is like storing data in many isolated boxes, without digestion, connection, and real usability. Box of information that often require own “operational system” and from one box to another demands time and energy and restarts.

Higher Education: If we deeply understand the key concepts, even if they represent just 1% of the contents, our minds can naturally generate and reconstruct the remaining 99%. Such minds can be creative and excellent developers for the next steps and future world.

Moreover, we can enjoy the common, beautiful foundations through a unified “operating system” of the mind, rather than struggling with fragmented boxes of information that require several restarts between disconnected compartments.

No need for overload.

No need for fragmentation.

What we truly need is:

✔️ Interdisciplinary understanding

✔️ Connected knowledge

✔️ Applicable skills for real life and work

Not isolated pieces of information.

It is time to rethink and improve educational systems worldwide, before our minds become overwhelmed by excessive accumulated information and loos the role improperly to AI tools, which should be our assistants in best way, not supervisor.

👉 Less emphasis on volume

👉 More focus on conceptual understanding

This is indeed our educational approach on World-Academies.Com , our knowledge management startup at Technical University of Dresden (Germany), developing specific courses (https://www.world-academies.com/courses-2/) in fundamental sciences & engineering, specially in mechanical & process engineering, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), multiphase modeling and simulation, turbulence, heat & mass transport phenomena, etc.

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