The educative purpose of higher education for human and social development in the context of globalization

Globalization presents a particularly challenging context for re-examining the educative purpose of higher education for human, community and social development. In the very first place, development itself is rarely explicitly claimed as a deliberate focus of most institutions of higher education. Given that the fundamental purpose of higher education is intellectual and moral development, this is not only a very strange stance but also one that is increasingly problematic and indeed ethically indefensible. In the face of the complexities of this late modern age, where 'bads' as well as 'goods' are circulating the globe with ever increasing frequency and causing ever-more destructive impacts on nature and society alike, it is becoming glaringly obvious that new ways of 'seeing' the world and 'dealing' with issues in it are urgently needed if sustainable futures for societies are to be achieved across the globe. If, as the substantive argument in this chapter holds, we humans have become victims of our own paradigmatic inadequacies in a manner that now threatens the very sustainability of life on earth, then higher education is duty bound to do all it can to transform prevailing epistemic assumptions and to liberate human and social development in the further pursuit of the considered and inclusively responsible life.