Building an ecosystem for higher education

There is a story in the Jataka tales about a merchant who sells a parrot with a gift for philosophy. The bird can recite the names of virtues and moralities flawlessly. What it cannot do is practise them because no one in the house models them. The merchant had given the parrot every advantage: a gilded cage, the finest seeds, and an excellent curriculum. What he has not given is an ecosystem.

Urie Bronfenbrenner, the American developmental psychologist, would have recognised the problem instantly. His Ecological Systems Theory, first proposed in 1979 and since absorbed into the mainstream of education, psychology and social policy, makes exactly this argument. According to Bronfenbrenner, one cannot understand a fish (student, child, leader or citizen) by studying it in isolation. You must study the water it swims in. Bronfenbrenner’s insight was not merely that environment matters. It was that environment is layered and those layers talk to each other in ways that policy often ignores.