Professor of Sociology
Michael Young

Abstract:
Knowledge, skills and the future of Higher Education

Professor of Sociology
Institute of Education
University College London
England


Opening Keynote Monday 28 Oct.
 

Abstract
In my presentation I will review the moves to make the university curriculum and their research priorities more relevant to what are assumed demands of a 21^st century economy, paying particular attention to the Mode 1 / Mode 2 debate initiated by Michael Gibbons and his colleagues. I will argue that this is a mistaken response to the economic and social problems facing both developed and developing countries. Additionally, reducing the role of academic disciplines as the basis of both teaching and research in universities can only lead to a weakening of higher education as the primary source for promoting innovation and developing new knowledge, both for academia and for the professions.

 

Michael Young is professor of Sociology of the curriculum at UCL’s Institute of Education. He studied for degrees at the universities of Cambridge, London and Essex, and was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Joensuu in Finland. As former secondary school science teacher, he took further degrees in sociology and joined the Institute of Education as Lecturer in Sociology of Education. His primary research interests have continued to be in the sociology of knowledge and extending this to the curriculum by drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim, Basil Bernstein and the cultural psychologist Lev Vygotsky. In 1986 he was invited to establish the Post 16 Education Centre and focused his research on vocational curriculum and the role of qualifications.

 

He was appointed Professor of Education in 1998 and since then has returned to the academic curriculum of schools in two books The Curriculum of the Future (1998) and Bringing Knowledge Back In (2007). Since 1990 he has been closely involved in debates about  the curriculum in post-apartheid South Africa and collaborated with a number of South African colleagues- most notably Jeanne Gamble and Johan Muller. With Rob Moore and Johan Muller he has helped launch the Cambridge Symposium on Knowledge in Education which has recently held its fifth bi-annual meeting. His most recent books (both with Johan Muller) are Knowledge, Expertise and the Professions (2014), and Curriculum and the specialization of Knowledge (2017). He was  recently invited to Tsinghua University, Beijing  for the launch of the Chinese translation of Bringing Knowledge Back In. Some years ago he was guest speaker at the Netherlands Association of Sociology of Education. 
 

For all publications see: https://iris.ucl.ac.uk/iris/browse/profile?upi=MFDYO34