Inside This Issue

The need for revolutionary transformation of higher education discussed in previous issues of Cadmus is acquiring momentum. In spite of the initial problems, skepticism and resistance, online education is rapidly gaining ground both within universities and outside them in MOOCs and alternative educational delivery systems. Today more than 17 million students are participating in online courses in the US and those numbers are rising fast in other countries as well. But the quantitative expansion of higher education represents only one side of the essential change that is needed. The work of the World Academy of Art & Science to evolve solutions to pressing global challenges has also called for revolutionary changes in the content and pedagogy of higher education that are needed to move beyond the inadequate piecemeal approach to knowledge and social problems prevalent today.

This issue of Cadmus focuses on the qualitative revolution in higher education that is needed to complement and complete its quantitative extension. It contains articles and a report on the World University Consortium’s three-day meeting on Future Education, which was conducted at Inter-University Centre, Dubrovnik from September 21-23, 2015. Information is multiplying at a phenomenal rate. The world is changing with unprecedented speed. The world’s educational system must learn how to consciously evolve and transform itself in order to support the critical transition. The meeting focused on the need for a multidimensional shift in higher education from an overemphasis on information in an age of information glut to greater emphasis on understanding organizing principles and relationships between phenomena, from memorization of facts to creative thinking, from passive to active learning, from fragmented to contextual knowledge, from mechanistic to organic or ecological conceptions, from abstract to life-centric studies, from discipline-speci c to trans-disciplinary perspectives, from abstract principles to spiritual values, and from subject to person-centered and personality-centered education. This issue of Cadmus raises many critical questions that require further exploration so that more effective approaches can be widely implemented.

This issue of Cadmus also continues our inquiry into the need for a reformulation of Economics and its integration with the social sciences. It contains several articles presented at the XII International Colloquium at the University of Florida at Gainesville in May 2015. These form initial contributions to the New Economic Theory working group constituted by WAAS and WUC at the Gainesville conference, which already includes 22 other collaborating institutions and 47 contributing individuals. For more information, readers are invited to visit www.neweconomictheory.org.

We hope you enjoy this issue.

The Editors