Implicit Curriculum of Higher Education

I'm the founder of Human Rethink, devoted to implementing the Implicit Curriculum of Higher Education and of the Economic Model. I’m also engaged full-time in operating an unrelated small business.

The Implicit Curriculum has not been implemented because:

1. I couldn't find collaborators. Over time, I have shared related ideas about the curriculum with several local academics and online. But they all claimed not to have expertise in the overlapping subject areas of the new paradigm.

2. Fear of losing ownership of my idea and control of its effective implementation. That is no longer the case, since an application to patent the Implicit Curriculum was filed on June 4, 2020.

Other than filing the patent, this is the first time that the details of my solution has ever been openly shared. But on July 13, the details of the Implicit Curriculum will be fully disclosed on the website.

Regardless of location, underdevelopment, poverty, corruption, instability, etc., are the endemic symptoms of the scarcity of effective managerial leadership in a modernizing economy. Higher-education is accepted as the incubator of the leadership needed for development. Developing countries have steadfastly invested in it for decades, but it has not worked. Instead, effective management is provided in scarce numbers from abroad. 

Solution supplies the missing indigenous leadership systematically and steadily without drama or upheaval, using existing systems of higher education. 

The conceptual heavy-lifting is done. The Implicit Curriculum has been discovered and the promise of its content and rigor are self-evident. Its paradigm is grounded in established scholarly tenets.

Our solution entails unprecedented collaboration between international higher education institutions. The organization that will coordinate its orderly implementation and effective maintenance is best led by the visionary leadership that developed it. Commensurate resources, personnel, and facilities are needed.

‘Higher-education for development’ is incomplete, and the result is underdevelopment. The Implicit Curriculum completes it.

The industrialized model of development is a subset of the culture of developed countries. So, they successfully implement the model not only with knowledge acquired in formal education but also with its implicit knowledge passively acquired in culture. Higher education emerged there to impart to their people the knowledge required to sustain and advance the model. Apparently for the same reason, higher education has been adopted wholesale in developing countries and many of their citizens attend university in developed countries.

But important aspects of culture aren't lucid and don’t leave a trail that is teachable. These aspects are implicit and cannot be captured in textbooks or learned with traditional instruction. As a subset of their larger culture, the economic model of developed countries has critical components acquired unconsciously through culture, apart from formal education. For people with a different culture, ‘higher education for development’ is thus incomplete, regardless of quality.

The cultures of developed countries passively supply individuals with implicit knowledge of the economic model, whereas developing countries generally have no access to such knowledge, no matter how much education their people receive.

The Implicit Curriculum is a full-time, 3 to 4-year undergraduate program in an academy of a developing country, consisting of 40 faculty-supervised capstone-quality research projects that focus on current controversial issues under categories including national security, governance, policy making, freedom, human rights, health, environment, science, technology, etc. Each project requires the research, analysis, and faculty supervision of a multi-part, interdisciplinary capstone course in standard undergraduate curricula. Enrichment activities are also an important part of the program. Five  projects, each worth 3 hours of college credit, are simultaneously taken per semester in the multi-year program. For guaranteed success, faculty supervision must be provided by academics in a developed country whose controversial issues will also be addressed in each topic.

The student will gather, analyze, and apply wide-ranging information and knowledge to render executive decisions in full-length research papers, the accuracy and logic of which are vetted by faculty supervision. Students thereby hone communication skills and learn to decipher their own analytical and problem-solving patterns and regularities in the economic model that are generally applicable or adaptable as modules for contingent, effective decision-making. The performance of graduates as managers and entrepreneurs will thereby be elevated to the level of developed countries.

Regardless of geographic location, Ineffective education equals persistent-underdevelopment. E.g., Nigeria has over 300 higher-education institutions that graduate about 600,000 people annually. But the country remains starved of competent managerial leadership that will put contemporary knowledge to use for rapid growth. Instead, graduates are unemployed at a 38% rate and most others are underemployed, while competent leadership and maintenance for contemporary operations are supplied unaffordably and in scarce numbers mainly from the West and China. Since 1981, the national currency has declined from 1 to 1/400th of the dollar while the population has more than doubled to 200 million, with a median age of 18 years. Desperation is growing and disaster awaits without intervention.

A developing country has extensive unmet needs due to ineffective managerial and entrepreneurial leadership. Effective education should equip every graduate to autonomously avail opportunities with competent leadership initiative. The Implicit Curriculum does that. Development will take-off as more of such people saturate the workforce to raise productivity and create jobs.

Attempts to improve education-quality are futile for solving this problem, since many of the educated are graduates of institutions in the West where quality is high. Our solution is desperately needed.

The Elevate Prize solicits revolutionary proposals for big challenges presumably to end poverty, conflict, and chaos in our world and to advance the human condition. Aid agencies, donors, and others have been known to sound the same alarm. But funding opportunities have been far from revolutionary and did not change the status-quo.

The Implicit Curriculum decisively answers the revolutionary call of the Elevate Prize with a solution that addresses the source of the challenges instead of symptoms. It is the "transformational change" that will actually elevate humanity by sustainably addressing and surpassing the SDG goals wherever it is implemented.

The Implicit Curriculum of Higher Education was inadvertently discovered after I undertook the curriculum accidentally and without guidance over a period of 4 years. While attending college in Texas, I worked on and off as a freelance research writing tutor and continued doing so for a while after college. Three years into tutoring, I got married to a fellow Nigerian near the beginning of a long-lasting recession in Nigeria. So we spent much time lamenting the problems of Nigeria. Nine months of doing this almost nonstop, while continuing as a writing tutor, led to the sudden realization that researching, analyzing, and interpreting information for solving problems in a wide range of topics in the U.S. over several years developed an instinctive sense of the economic model that may be expressed as competent management, entrepreneurship, and innovation. 

While my discovery is potentially a world-changing panacea, I could not communicate it openly because I had to first gather the data and construct the theory that could successfully challenge the dominance of contemporary undergraduate curricula. But without collaboration or support, I eventually realized that doing this alone was a Herculean task that would take a long time to complete. Unfortunately, it did.

The discovery of the Implicit Curriculum was born of the passion to end suffering in Nigeria, but it is relevant to every postcolonial country. This passion now stems from confidence that the problem of underdevelopment is already solved by the discovery and its paradigm, and that the burden to let the world know about it and to implement it is carried entirely by me. It also stems from guilt that an effective solution has been lying fallow while human suffering festers in our world. Try as I might, there has been no escape from the overwhelming feeling of personal responsibility that events caused by ineffective education, such as the Arab spring, the Latin American uprisings, poverty, corruption, instability, and even terrorism, could have been averted or relieved with my solution that addresses the source of persistent underdevelopment instead of its symptoms.

This decades-long lonely effort and sacrifice to single-handedly unwind the most complex issue of our time and to demonstrate that we can make sense of our world, while engaged in an unrelated full-time day job, calls for a passion that probably can’t be fully expressed with words. Although, a few associates have called it an obsession.

The following only hints at my knowledge and ability to effectively communicate the project to any audience at any level, defend it against any logical opposition, and, most importantly, the ability to sell and deliver it.

The recent emphasis of the World Bank on raising the quality of education to improve higher-order thinking that will facilitate effective participation in the knowledge economy is laudable. But attributing the ineffectiveness of ‘higher-education-for-development’ to poor quality is misleading and predicts the certain futility of any remedy. After-all, millions from developing countries have already obtained higher education in developed countries, where quality is high, yet little else has changed. Higher education simply does not supply the learning that could facilitate real development for people from a different culture. Expecting otherwise with a higher quality of more-of-the-same is therefore redundant. By-the-way, China, Japan, and S.-Korea, are different because their cultures have similarities in common with the West.

Persistent underdevelopment has defied a solution because it is resistant to empirical, incremental analysis, a.k.a. a frontal approach. Worse yet, the components of the problem exist in conceptual areas that have been separated by traditional knowledge boundaries and methodologies. Without the guidance and touch-stone of a viable solution, data cannot be coherently organized and interpreted to reveal the true nature of the problem. Our solution shows that previous attempts have not been successful because they have tried to conform the problem to existing conceptions instead of addressing it on the terms of the problem itself.

Persistent underdevelopment is the common thread of human misery. The problem is obviously difficult, defying the investigations of generations of scholars. The effort required to first, discover the Implicit Curriculum, and then package it with a comprehensive paradigm, is my submission for overcoming adversity.

The Implicit Curriculum does not need a paradigm to be effective. However, it has been frustrating to try over many years to gain support for it with only the paradigm without divulging its details. That is no longer the case, as the full details are now on the website and in patent review. But a compelling paradigm, supported by seminal ideas in academia, is indispensable, given the formidable entrenched positions the solution seeks to overthrow and the authority of their proponents.

Independently acquiring the wide-ranging knowledge to construct the theory, while engaged in an unrelated full-time career, armed only with my determination and belief in the power of the solution, has been a lonely endeavor in personal sacrifice, punctuated with worry, doubt, guilt, bouts of “why me?”, and occasional resentment for doing the job that many others are paid to do.

But I am here now, ready to move forward as the necessary resources become available.

I have operated my own business for 30 years, during which I have hired and supervised scores of people.

If the liberal education curriculum in its various forms has ever lived up to its supporting rhetoric, it has done so only for the developed countries and their expatriate diaspora. If higher-education actually delivered for developing countries the expectations expressed in graduation speeches, they too would be developed by now and persistent underdevelopment would have been eradicated from our world.

For the first time ever, the Implicit Curriculum of Higher Education systematically delivers for developing countries what the liberal education component of higher-education already receives credit for doing, but has not done. The persistence of underdevelopment in developing countries, fueled by the irredeemable shortage of effective managerial leadership despite ever-increasing higher education attainment, is evidence that, for most, the liberal education curriculum adds little else to the vocational training offered in higher education. Higher education has not imparted the training needed for graduates to regularly become effective leaders for development in society, the type who will perform as well as expatriates and lift developing countries to the level of the developed. Thanks to vocational training, higher education has been good mainly for personal benefit—when the graduate is fortunate to find a job—and generally for superficial economic modernization. 

The Implicit Curriculum of Higher Education is a practical blueprint for making development happen in developing countries. Its paradigm, the inclusive theory of change, is the missing unifying theme for seemingly disparate premises about people, the economy, and society. It is a new tool for interpreting and diagnosing problems in the human condition.

Only the implementation of the Implicit Curriculum will prove that it imparts the learning to achieve rapid development. While the inclusive theory of change explains how the Curriculum works, it is not required for it to work. This is similar to the relationship between the human ability to use language and attempts to explain how it works.

Graduates of the Curriculum will decisively improve the functioning of the public and private sectors of the economy. As more such people are added to the economy by the thousands or tens of thousands annually, they will diffuse to bring about sustainable rapid growth.

Expatriates from developed countries routinely succeed in developing countries, seemingly immune to the issues that allegedly hold-back competent managerial and entrepreneurial leadership among locals. Expatriates appear equipped with an instinctive knowledge of how things should work, a diagnostic filter for the proper operation of the Western-style economic model. So, even without competitive pressure, relatively stable systems of infrastructure, administration, and production become subject to at least effective technical upkeep and anticipatory maintenance, and to innovative and productivity enhancements. Such consistent trouble-shooting and problem-solving-vigilance regarding the economic model are too demanding to be a matter of conscious will. It is an unconscious instinct.

The Implicit Curriculum develops in the student a similar unconscious diagnostic instinct. Wherever they're employed, graduates will routinely maximize entrepreneurial opportunity with competent management and perform as well as expatriates.

Poverty, corruption, bad governance, and instability are merely the unavoidable symptoms of the economic model struggling to operate in a developing country with technical knowledge alone, without implicit knowledge. Widespread and increasing managerial competence means that industrial import-substitution will begin at a sustained, accelerating pace that will provide quality employment for a wide and growing swath of the population. This will facilitate a higher standard of living that will slow population growth and subdue governance to public accountability.

Also, competent administrative leadership will become available to bureaucracies. Their organizations will operate with increasing efficiency and so will their Institutions. With plentiful, affordable, competent indigenous managerial leadership, development planning will migrate from wish-lists to reality.

The ongoing, overriding goal is to build, nurture, and fortify the expanding promotion of the Implicit Curriculum through the Human Rethink Institute and to protect the Curriculum. The Implicit Curriculum and its inclusive theory of change are new paradigms that provide hope and inspiration to people around the world. While the rigor and potential of the Curriculum are self-evident, the duty exists to protect it from conventional wisdom that might unwittingly weaken its rigor and dilute its potential. Oversight and protecting its integrity against fraud and plagiarism are also among essential ongoing aspects. It is a disaster for developing countries and for the world if the Implicit Curriculum is ineffective for any reason, least of all inadequate oversight.

Year 1:

1. Establish through partnerships scalable framework and infrastructure to successfully implement the Implicit Curriculum. Secure the logistical, manpower, and funding resources required for implementation. 

2. Sign up as many institutions as possible in developing countries that are willing to participate in the program and sign up corresponding institutions in developed countries.

Year 2-5:

1. Begin the implementation of the Implicit Curriculum.

2. Continue signing up more partners and participating institutions.

3. Graduate the first set of students in year 5.

The main barrier at the moment is a lack of time and resources for Human Rethink. The Implicit Curriculum and its inclusive theory of change were formulated while I held a full-time day job of operating an unrelated enterprise. That remains the case even now. A project of this significance demands the undistracted attention of its originator for timely and effective implementation. This main barrier is delaying effective dissemination of the new ideas and preventing the actions that will facilitate implementation.

The Implicit Curriculum is not a hard sell. Developing countries (at least some in Nigeria) now realize that “higher education for development” is an empty slogan, and developed countries are seeking solutions for underdevelopment (such as the Elevate Prize)

However, the numerous elements of its implementation require meticulous organization, personnel, and funding. Start-up costs in the U.S. include office space, recruiting qualified personnel, convening a board of directors, establishing partnerships, subscribing to online systems, and developing their use for the Curriculum. Demands for academies in developing countries include bandwidth, personal computers for students, library access to databases of articles and books, a resident dedicated program-integrity-administrator, and the cost of supervision by faculty in partner academies in developed countries. 

Ongoing implementation will be largely self-funding. Developing countries already have fully-staffed higher education facilities that could adopt the Implicit Curriculum universally or in part as a trial. Other needs can be met through student fees and with government funding. E.g., Nigeria’s TETFUND. Existing funding from overseas donors remains crucial.

Proceeds from the Elevate Prize will partly address the issue of salary replacement for the author.

The professional support, capacity building and especially connection with influencers, industry leaders, and experts provided by the Elevate Prize Foundation should be sufficient to overcome initial barriers and get the ball rolling.

None.

Beyond start-up costs. ongoing implementation of the Implicit Curriculum will be largely self-funding. Developing countries already have fully-staffed higher education facilities that could adopt the Implicit Curriculum universally or in part as a trial. Other needs can be met through student fees and with government funding. E.g., Nigeria’s TETFUND. Existing funding from overseas donors remains crucial.

For speedy implementation, it is most efficient to work in the United States from within an established organization with adequate resources, such as a development agency like the USAID, one of its top 40 contractors, or any of the leading foundations that sponsor economic development projects in the global south, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Ford Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Open Society Foundation, etc.

Nevertheless, no single organization can effectively implement the Implicit Curriculum in its full scope. In addition to a main partner from the above candidates, a gamut of additional partners with a shared sense of purpose are needed in the U.S. and donor countries, including as many higher education institutions in these countries as are willing to participate.