Francisco Esteban Bara warns of university decline due to job obsession

The UB professor criticizes that the obsession with employability has turned knowledge into a mere resource, like a screwdriver.

Imatge genèrica d'una pila de llibres acadèmics antics sobre un escriptori modern, simbolitzant el declivi del saber tradicional.

Imatge genèrica d'una pila de llibres acadèmics antics sobre un escriptori modern, simbolitzant el declivi del saber tradicional.

The Professor of Philosophy of Education at the University of Barcelona, Francisco Esteban Bara, recently warned that higher education is in decline due to the loss of respect for knowledge and the exclusive rise of job placement.

Esteban Bara, author of books such as La universidad light and La universidad de las narices, points out that faculties are ceasing to be 'temples of knowledge' because current society values knowledge only as 'one more resource,' equating it to a tool.

"There are teachers who have been teaching for 20 years and, in reality, it is one year because they have been repeating what they taught the first year for 19 years."

Francisco Esteban Bara · Professor of Philosophy of Education at UB
The professor laments that university marketing focuses almost exclusively on guaranteeing access to the job market and good salaries, instead of promoting wisdom, light, or truth, which should be the foundational objectives of the institution.
To illustrate the situation, Esteban Bara explains that first-year students cannot name any Nobel Prize winner, but instead, they unanimously know the birthplace of the singer Bustamante, in San Vicente de la Barquera.
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