Social roles in education: student-client, teacher-manager-educationalist, teaching-mercantile institution

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to supply subsidies (information) in order to rethink the challenges of the graduate education , especially those of the Business Schools. It is based on the evaluation of roles of the involved social actors in the process of teaching-learning and its expectations in respect to the other actors: the student-customer, the professor-manager-educator and the teaching-mercantile institution. During one year a qualitative research was conducted with students and professors in a broad master’s degree private Graduate School. Analysis of the data content has given evidence about the unclear and confused role of professors and students giving way to conflicts of interests. It also concludes that the social roles established are deeply influenced by the commercial relation of the business of education sometimes colliding with its pedagogical objectives.