A salesman at a branded kitchen showroom, in his late thirties, was doing his job just right. Included in it within the limits of the minimum expectations defined by the bosses, but still quite enough to arouse interest and keep the attention of us customers. There was something intriguing and interesting, laced with a subtle irony from the background, in his tone and performance that prompted me to engage him in a somewhat more personal conversation.
The man turned out to be a master of philosophy. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in philosophy a little over ten years ago and has changed seven jobs since then. Most of them included sales activities in the form of direct communication with customers. "You know, when you read ancient philosophy well and at the end you complete that reading with a graduate thesis on the topic of Aristotle, every job of this type is ridiculously simple," my interlocutor pointed out with those words.
I remember this anecdote every time when, as a university employee, I witness a new episode of the eternal reform of science and higher education here. The last such package launched by the competent Ministry of Science and Education - all as part of the negotiation and signing of a new round of program contracts regulating the financing of public higher education institutions and public scientific institutes - thus brought a hundred new-old strategic goals, defined and imperatively put before the educational scientific institutions as a set of tasks, nominally all for the purpose of increasing the relevance, quality and efficiency of studying.
The starting point of the problematic thesis is that current demographic, economic and social challenges call for the modernization of the way of studying, and this implies, among other things, that students learn through project work, that they attend professional internships with subjects from the economy, that study programs are harmonized with the needs of the labor market and the interests of the so-called . employers and the like, all already known.
Basically, the continuation of the reduction of what we still call studying, all in the direction of "skills-oriented education" and adapted to the ideology of the capitalist dictatorship of the market and profit. There is great hypocrisy at work. Because if the virtuous reformers really aimed to produce practically versed young people, capacitated for skillful and quick project solutions to specific problem motives in the markets, then they would start from a value point that they themselves are aware of, but reject even more consciously.
A prerequisite for the successful performance of particular work tasks, regardless of which market we are talking about, is a holistic, complete approach that includes insight into the context of the problem, into their genealogy and place in the system. My interlocutor from the beginning of the introduction, an Aristotelian kitchen salesman, is an excellent example of this. Ignoring such a perspective is a practice of consciously producing fahidiotism.
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