Lecture

Higher education as self-formation

Date: Wednesday, 29 November 2017 6:00 pm - 7:15 pm

Location: Jeffrey Hall, UCL Institute of Education

Speaker(s):

Simon Marginson, University of Oxford and University of Bristol

Higher education can be understood as a process of self-formation – a process of self-cultivation, immersed in complex knowledge, that enables the student to become more capable and more autonomous and self-determining.

Here, the self-forming individual in education brings into practical form the idea of freedom to be and to do that is central to the human condition.

There are many perspectives on higher education that connect with this notion of self-formation – from human capital theory that sees education as an investment in future employment and earnings, and sociologists that understand it as a means of advancing social position, to JH Newman and Basil Bernstein who focus on how learned knowledge shapes people’s values and capabilities, through to German notions of ‘Bildung’ and Confucian ideas of self-cultivation that understand individual education as enmeshed in society.

In this lecture, Professor Marginson will reconcile these contrasting approaches and develop an argument for a ‘socially-nested’ form of self-formation that embeds individual life paths in the common good.

The lecture will draw on a sweep of ideas from the fields of education and social science, including the late work of Michel Foucault on the formation of autonomous human subjects, Amartya Sen’s forms of freedom and idea of capability, and Vygotsky’s positioning of individual development in social and cultural context.

Professor Marginson will also remark on the apparent paradox of today’s high participation higher education systems: while they have made self-formation more democratic and educated human capabilities more widespread, the opportunities to use those capabilities seem to be shrinking as societies (i.e. social formation, as distinct from self-formation) become more unequal.

Professor Simon Marginson

Simon Marginson is Professor of Higher Education with emeritus status at the University of Oxford, and Professor of Higher Education at the University of Bristol in the UK. He is Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University in China and a Professorial Associate with the University of Melbourne in Australia, and also Joint Editor-in-Chief of the journal Higher Education. Simon was the founding Director of the ESRC/RE Centre for Global Higher Education (CGHE), which he led between 2015 and 2024. Simon’s research is focused primarily on global and international higher education, the global science system, higher education in East Asia, the contributions of higher education, and higher education and social inequality. Simon led CGHE’s project 8 which investigated the public good role of higher education in ten countries. The project found that while a broad notion of public good has been largely emptied out of policy in the English-speaking countries, where economic definitions of individualised pecuniary value are dominant, recognition of the broader individual and collective outcomes of higher education continues in different ways in other jurisdictions including France, Finland, South Korea and China. The study in England discovered however that despite the narrow economic framing used by Westminster policy makers, both higher education practitioners and policy professionals believe that higher education makes a large and multiple contribution to both national and global public goods. With Lili Yang, Simon co-authored a 2022 paper ‘Individual and collective outcomes of higher education: a comparison of Anglo-American and Chinese approaches’ which found that if the Anglophone economic notion of a zero-sum trade-off between public goods and private goods is removed, then the full range of higher education’s contributions emerge and the two systemic approaches to the public good role are compatible despite differences in the respective political cultures. Simon’s most recent book, authored with CGHE researcher Vassiliki Papatsiba of Cardiff University, is Brexit, EU students and UK higher education: Broken bridges, published by Bloomsbury Academic in August 2025. Forthcoming, also from CGHE research, are The future of cross-border academic mobility and immobility: Power, knowledge and agency, edited by Aline Courtois, Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery and Ravinder Sidhu (Bloomsbury Academic, December 2025); and the sole authored Simon Marginson, Global higher education in times of upheaval: On common goods, geopolitics and decolonisation (Bloomsbury Academic, January 2026). All three of these books are available for free download on an Open Access basis with the support of UKRI. You can contact Simon at simon.marginson@bristol.ac.uk or simon.marginson@education.ox.ac.uk