education for a new economy

David Korten at Yes! magazine has an article on The New Economy Challenge:  Implications for Higher Education.  Here are some other specific recommendations for our universities:

1. Take down the walls that separate the university from the community. Engage university faculty and students in the social learning processes by which locally rooted human communities are learning to align themselves with the structures and processes of their local ecosystems. Place less focus on degree programs and more focus on continuing, lifelong learning.
2. Break down the disciplinary barriers and reorganize as interdisciplinary teams engaged in the study and design of critical institutional systems.
3. Teach history as an examination of large forces that have shaped history, in search of insights into how large-scale social change happens.
4. Replace existing economics departments with departments of ecology. Include ecological economists in these departments, but put the focus on the ecology. Invite the conventional economists who currently staff most university economics programs to retire, retrain as ecological economists, or be assigned to teach economics as one of a number of courses on the intellectual history of the 20th century and where it went wrong.
5. Feature courses on human developmental psychology that explore how the pathways to a fully mature human consciousness are shaped by differing cultural and institutional experiences.
6. Replace the metaphor of the machine with the metaphor of the living organism as the defining intellectual frame. Staff biology departments with new biologists who strive to understand life on its own terms rather than through the dead-world lens of Newtonian physics.