Continuing the insular trend in higher education, British students are becoming less inclined to study non-European modern languages.
And the focus is resolutely insular, as we would expect from our nationalistic education secretary – a real departure from the current syllabus, which shows an interest in parts of the world beyond Britain and introduces children to critical thinking.
At schools in these insular communities, religious studies take precedence over basic education like math, languages, and science.
Cox wrote much of the brief, and contended in it that "the outcome of this controversy will decide for future generations whether blacks, Chicanos and other insular minorities are to have meaningful access to higher education and real opportunities to enter the learned professions".
"One of the problems we have had in education, and as a country, is that we have been too insular for too long".
But this rebirth requires a massive investment in education, to move it away from uncritical repetition, and steps by the insular Arab states to encourage greater interaction with other nations and cultures and an easing of their social and political restrictions on criticism, the press and importing of ideas from abroad.
He explains: "The contrast of social traditions was a shock; campus-based universities tend to be far more insular, whereas such a thing is absent from Heidelberg's university students, who treat their education like a job – it's just something you do, not a defining attribute.
Where older buildings endeavored to create an icon to represent "education" within the community -- but kept that community at bay by creating an insular world of learning within -- these new schools are attempting to bring the life of the community into the building itself.
Vassar, where I teach, is one of those campuses that seems to typify, for some, how wacky and permissive higher education has become a readymade specimen for those seeking to depict the twenty-first-century American college at its most insular and navel-gazing.
Northern Ireland is already insular.
