Today, lakhs of students travel to different countries to study. There is an increasingly competitive market in which universities compete directly against each other. Reasons are two — to catch best students and the interest towards money they bring.
The introduction of performance indicators across the global higher education sector – which is persistently increasing with “gamified” rankings, has winners and losers as a mark of the result.
This game is favourable for the universities for whose the stakes are high. However, for students and academics, this stake into a competitive game is worrisome.
As per Luca Morini who writes for World Economic Forum, goes ahead to explain, “more students are dropping out of university because of mental health problems.”
A survey by the American Freshman Project found that 43% of academic staff exhibited symptoms of at least one mild mental disorder, with increased workloads, and pressures surrounding the job primarily to blame.
Rewinding the History
The gamification of education can be directly traced back to the 19th-century pseudoscience of “Social Darwinism” and the eugenics movement. This considered life as a “gladiatorial struggle”, which has been dominant ever since – even when disproved by science.
So, in spite of all the evidence towards the importance of working together and cooperation, many people still believe that competition is the most efficient way to organise society.
This hints to the idea that education has to be competitive and only the best will win.
Rethinking the approach
Luca’s research in the field of global higher education shows how entrenched this global “game” has become. Her research on playful learning has also shown me a possible way out.
Scholar Bernard DeKoven explained two different ways of forming a community around any game: “game community” and “play community”. The game community is all about winning: the game comes first, it is unchangeable and decides who is a worthy player and who is not. This concept can be well connected with both in education and in society as a whole.
The play community is the opposite. It’s about the involvement of the players. It’s the players who decide if a game is worth playing or is it needed to be changed.
The second approach shall help towards creating an alternative, cooperative and inclusive higher education system that promotes student well-being rather than personifying more of ranks and cadres.