It would not be surprising if higher education had adapted to accommodate our need to comfortably negotiate an increasingly complex humanly constructed real world. And then we might suppose that philosophy would have a diminishing role to play in education. If this story of an ever-more programmed world is true, it is one that has crept up on us. If you put a frog in water and raise the temperature slowly, the frog will eventually be boiled alive. Invisible increments add up, and the outcome is bad for the frog.
Education has to adapt to changing times.
To adapt successfully, the frog should have noticed something wrong, got a thermometer, kept records and jumped. I argue that it is philosophical attitudes, habits and skills that can prevent our universities from being boiled alive. Adaptation can be active and responsive or it can be reactive. Reactive adaptation responds to surface changes without grasping their shape and logic, allows the terms of the relationship to be dictated entirely by the other party. Active adaptation tries to grasp the law of change, not to be led by the nose, but to grasp and even create the opportunities that change brings.