Empowering Student Minds

Abstract

A university is not a factory, and students are not objects to be processed. Yet while we may take this broader view of higher education for granted, it is increasingly overshadowed by dominant discourses shaped by neoliberal policy, credentialism, and market competition. Responding to the growing need for an alternative discourse, this book reclaims the intrinsic and humanistic purpose of higher education. Based on multisited ethnographic research with thirteen South Korean students navigating higher education in both Korea and the United Kingdom, this book argues that we must reframe higher education as a process of academic self-formation—a process in which students actively transform themselves through sustained engagement with knowledge. Unlike the prevailing narratives of students as passive recipients or consumers of higher education, this book foregrounds their agency. By highlighting the diverse and distinctive ways they augment themselves through the formative power of knowledge, it modernises William Perry’s seminal research on student development through engagement with knowledge, conducted more than fifty years ago. As the first sustained study of students’ academic self-formation, it lays the foundation for a new research programme with broad applications. It compares local and international students across diverse disciplines in both Western and East Asian higher education contexts, making the framework internationally and interdisciplinarily relevant. In particular, it presents the experiences of South Korean students whose self-formation, mediated by Confucian heritage, enriches cultural multiplicity in current debates on student agency and higher education.