Beyond Certificate Factory: Intellectual Innovation in Systems of Education

In this section of Human Arenas, we continue the critical and constructive analysis of the contemporary state of affairs of universities as arenas for both the highest level of education and for the creation of new knowledge that was started 5 years ago (Valsiner et al. in Sustainable futures for higher education: The making of knowledge makers (pp. vii-x) Cham, 2018a) and continued recently (Gebert & Woller in Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science 56, 4, 2023). Admittedly, the Humboldtian ideal of freedom for knowledge creation united with education has eroded in the social-administrative assumption of control over universities. As a result, today we can observe institutions of higher education gloriously producing graduates with various certificates as a reward for successfully passing through the socially approved curricula under the general pressures of neoliberal ideologies that emphasize social and fiscal conformity to expectations. The result in the side of contents of the education is intensive replication of existing knowledge with limited emphasis on innovations that go beyond the approved curriculae. This is successfully camouflaged by introducing different criteria of success of the institutions—value ranking of universities, bibliometric indices in scholarly evaluations, creating mandatory courses, and expecting academics to bring in funds into the universities under the conditions of the high rate of rejections of grant applications. The contributions to this section bring forth concrete suggestions for new ways of restoration of knowledge construction focus to university frameworks: new forms of courses with non-fixed learning tasks, close unity of internship experiences with post-graduation activities, and substitution of mandatory elements of higher education by necessary ones with openness to future construction of knowledge.