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South Africa: Give Us Thinkers, Not Technicians
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Business Day (Johannesburg)
17 April 2008
Posted to the web 17 April 2008
Sue Blaine
Johannesburg
QUICK-thinking New York traders turned disaster into profit when they sold dollars and bought gold the day two passenger planes hit the city's World Trade Centre - hours later the stock exchange closed, but the traders had made a fortune.
Information, and its speedy dissemination and translation, is becoming increasingly important to the world's economy and the world of work is increasingly intent on graduates who have specific skills . But at what cost?
The presiding philosophy that economic growth is the panacea for all society's ills, from which flows the idea that graduates must immediately fit into the workplace and that management criteria should be used to deliver any service, has stripped away the inquisitive for the practical and has universities turning out technicians instead of thinkers, says Prof Peter Vale, Rhodes University's Nelson Mandela Chair of Politics.
But, are SA' s university humanities faculties in crisis?
"The Academy of Science of SA (ASSAf) is about to approve an inquiry into this question," says Wieland Gevers, the academy's executive officer.
Through Vale, concerned South African academics have got in touch with a group of their Australian peers who have established a global network of humanities teachers to "reinvigorate" arts education.
The network aims to put English and other liberal arts subjects back on track as subjects that are about more than simply preparing students for the world of work, says network coordinator Dr Jacqueline Manuel, a senior English lecturer at the University of Sydney.
In SA, higher education policy has got "the mix" wrong in its bias towards science and technology at the expense of the humanities, says Prof John Higgins, a professor in English language and literature at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
"Yet, as Jonny Steinberg's new book on AIDS ( Three-Letter Plague: A young man's journey through a great epidemic ) demonstrates with appalling force, it would be a mistake -- it has been a mistake -- to think of the problem of AIDS in scientific ter ms alone: the real social substance of the problem is a cultural, and by extension a political, one which people trained in humanities have a major role in addressing," he says.
Paradoxically, amid SA's swing towards purpose-driven education, there was talk in academic circles of the worth of stipulating that university students complete a four-year first degree along the lines of the first degree US students have to complete before specialising in the field of their choice, says Gevers.
There is huge resistance to this from some quarters, and "a lot of patchwork" being done, such as at UCT, where engineering undergraduates are expected to do a course in professional communication -- but the US first degree is a huge strength .
There is a common belief, used as an argument against liberal arts degrees, that humanities graduates make up the bulk of SA's unemployed people, but work by UCT's Development Policy Research Unit shows that it is commerce graduates who top the list of the unemployed, at 28,1% of all unemployed graduates in 2005, with unemployment among humanities graduates the lowest (4,9%) of all seven categories of unemployed graduates the unit probed .
Importantly, the unit has shown that most graduate unemployment (82%) is among those who hold diplomas, not university degrees, and unit director Prof Haroon Bhorat cautions that commerce students typically make up "a very large" proportion of the student body and the numbers of unemployed commerce graduates need to be seen in this context.
It is true there are many humanities graduates who struggle to find work, but this often depends on the quality -- or lack thereof -- of their degree.
Both Gevers and Prof Rory Ryan, Dean of Humanities at the University of Johannesburg, pointed to retired AngloGold Ashanti CEO Bobby Godsell as an example of the heights to which a humanities graduate can rise, as Godsell holds a master of arts degree from the former University of Natal .
SA's university community is debating how to strengthen humanities degrees through curriculum planning that will ensure that students take "tougher" courses, says Gevers.
"I'm not decrying the traditional model, but in SA ... we need to impose rigour and compulsion. The great majority (of students) have been to rote learning schools and (at university) they are now confronted with a rigour of thought to which they are not used. They need not to take subjects because they think they are easy. We need a transformational model," he says.
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The modern world would be inconceivable without continued high-level training in science and technology, but if this was at the expense of training in critical literacy -- conceptual astuteness, analytical proficiency and the ability to grasp and communicate complex issues -- then society as a who le is impoverished, says Ryan.
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