Full Length Research Paper
A Critical Perspective to Higher Education in the 21st Century Tunisia: The Problems of the Present and the Challenges of the Future
Taher Ben Khalifa
Article Number - 65E1CD0A61D20 | Vol. 1(1), pp. 1-13, March 2024 |
Received: 13 December 2023 | Accepted: 24 January 2024 | Published: 1 March 2024
Copyright © 2024 Author(s) retain the copyright of this article.
This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.
Abstract
The impact of the gap between education and
economy on the dynamic progress of society is frequently searched. In Tunisia,
the increase of unemployment among graduates is a logical reason to question
the match between our education and economy. To study this question, a
theoretical connection between theory of social change, theory of economic
change, theory of educational innovation, and theory of matching is
established. The concepts and ideas that form these theories are analyzed and
discussed in the conceptual analysis section. Then, they wereapplied for the
analysis of the changes occurring in the three contexts in the section devoted
to data analysis and discussion using a pure qualitative method. First, the
changes occurring in the social, economic, and educational contexts are
analyzed. Second, the findings of the analysis are discussed. The results of
the study showed that society, economy, and education witnessed many changes.
The examination of the match between these changes proved that higher education
reforms did not succeed to fit with the needs of both society and economy. This
mismatch is the outcome of a gap between the theorizing for reform and the
practice of it, a problem of orientedness, a limited ability to build
creativity, a limited ability to predict, a problem of logic in specialty
creation, and a temporal disconnection between past, present, and future.
Finally, the paper recommends that the success of educational reforms to fit
with social and economic changes entails the reduction of the gap between
theory of reform and its practice, making reform context-dependent, and making
reform creativity-oriented. Therefore, though valuable these recommendations
are, a quantitative study of the topic could be another important axe to
investigate in a future research.
Keywords: Tunisia, Higher
education, Society, Economy, Mismatch.
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Authors
Taher Ben Khalifa
Department
of English, Higher Institute of Applied Studies in Humanities, University of
Gafsa, Gafsa, Tunisia. E-mail: [email protected], Tel.: +216 25 065 755
How to Cite this Article
Ben Khalifa, T. (2024). A
Critical Perspective to Higher Education in the 21st Century Tunisia: The
Problems of the Present and the Challenges of the Future. Trends in Education and Educational Studies, 1(1), 1-13.
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