Abstract:

The alarming tendency of institutions of higher education to adopt a corporate culture and introduce the concept of efficiency in education is a notion that will cause the processing of an individual through a system, instead of transforming. Historically institutions of higher education did not consider literacy which today can be translated as acquiring a degree in a specialized field, but a place for transforming individuals to become leaders in that field. To be literate in a language is to know how to assemble symbols and generate words and sentences particular to that language, but the origin of a word is the meaning attached to it. One, who knows how to assemble the words without knowing the meaning, is no different than the assembler hardware of a computer. To be educated in the same language is to learn the art of accentuating the meanings by assembling the words in a unique order. Today we focus on literacy in technical fields and there is no emphasis on underlying principles. In analogy to language today the schools of higher education are focused on giving the student body the symbolic literacy without engaging them in how the laws governing a process emerge from complexities of sub units. In many disciplines we are satisfied with the fact that a student can write a program to predict the behavior of a complex system, by using the final formula depicting the systems behavior. Noticing that the formula or the law itself has been the condensation of thought process of an abstract thinker, it leaves the modern student in the circle of literate rather than educated. The objective of this paper is to place the concept of integration of ideas in education process in a way that transforms an individual. This can be done be going back to methodologies used in the past in majority of colleges and universities and introduce the simulation in one of the stages. These stages are: Define the system, explain the complex relationship between parameters of the system, explain the theory linking these parameters, perform calculations, simulate and build a model to test. The steps, calculation and simulation are where the new technology should be employed.