Prof Brian O'Connell, UWC Rector, on Education Challenges: briefing
Meeting Summary
Prof Brian O’Connell asked why was the African Renaissance necessary. He sketched the relationship between Africans and new knowledge, starting with the First Birth - the birth of humankind in Africa. He referred to the Second Birth, that of Africa as the leader in new knowledge in the world, with the establishment of the Library of Alexandria (Egypt), 3000 BC.The Third Birth occurred between the 9th and 14th century AD when a library was established in Timbuktu (Mali) and it became the intellectual hub of Africa.
A big part of the anti –apartheid struggle was the fight for quality education. Schools were hubs for political mobilisation and ideological recruitment during the struggle. The fact that politics took precedence and learning was pushed aside, undermined the authority of and the respect for teachers and principals. The legacy of this history was the death of a culture of learning in the schools
In 1994, freedom was won, and the new country had to be built. This situation assumed a resumption of the learning culture. It never got off the ground. Dramatic and far-reaching changes were made to the education system. Outcomes Based Education (OBE) was introduced which proved to be an unsuitable system for South Africa. Although this was evident, due to political loyalties, this system was introduced in the high schools in 2005. As a result of this system, the levels of literacy and academic proficiency in university students were dangerously low. This fact showed up in a recent survey in which six universities took place.
To transcend this situation would take a lot of hard work by the whole nation. Learners and students had to commit to learn. Teachers had to commit to teach. Parents had to commit to discipline their children better. Communities had to support learners and arrange Saturday classes. Universities had to produce more honours, masters and PhD’s and much more scientific research had to be undertaken, by young black South African people. The whole country had to unify resolutely behind education and all round skills development with an emphasis on scientific skill.
Why was all of this necessary? Without it, the country and the whole of Africa was facing an abyss. New knowledge and new technology was needed to face the challenges of the current period, and it would be more so, in the future. In 1950 the population of Africa was 221 million. In 1990 the population was 700 million. In 40 years, the population in South Africa tripled from 13 million to 39 million. These people needed clean water, they needed clean sustainable energy sources, they needed to be fed and clothed, they needed medicine and medical services, and houses. The resources were under pressure. Unless these challenges were met adequately, societies would come crashing down.
Countries in Africa had collapsed. There was nothing that protected South Africa from going the same route. The only possible guarantee against collapse was a huge concerted effort by all South Africans to make education work. So the answer to the “why” question would be: for the sake of survival.
There was consensus from the Committee that this presentation would be the beginning of an intense engagement. There was consensus that the debate had to extend into all sectors of government and beyond, because all were affected. All educational institutions as well as strategic youth formations would be drawn in. A DA member suggested that Prof O’ Connell had to deliver the presentation to Parliament as a whole. Most Members agreed that the presentation gave them a perspective on the challenges that the country and the continent faced, that they did not have before. It was a wake-up call to rise above party political interests and start working on the long term survival of the country.
Meeting report
The Chairperson explained that the Committee had to understand what was happening in the Sector Education and Training Authorities (SETA’s) The Committee had sent a questionnaire to the SETA’s. The Committee had had presentations by SETA representatives over the previous three weeks, and had developed an understanding of what the Department of Education tried to communicate to the Committee regarding the SETA’s. The Chairperson and the Whip approached Prof Brian O’Connell to ask for assistance in analysing of the data collected during the aforementioned processes. Important announcements would be made within the next three months about what the educational landscape would be like over the next five years concerning the SETA’s. It was important for the Committee to have some form of engagement on it.
The Committee also met with the legal representative of Parliament to reflect on the educational landscape process and ensuring that the voice of the people would be heard.
Prof Brian O’Connell explained that the Committee, which was a relatively young one within the new political landscape of
The Committee did oversight visits to most universities of technology as well as certain universities and colleges. The Committee was excited about the new landscape unfolding in education, but was concerned about implementation and ensuring that things happened as it ought to. Prof O’Connell did this presentation at the Mitchells Plain Summit on Education recently.
Prof O’Connell said he had a sense that the Committee understood what had to be done as well as how it could be achieved. He reflected on why it had to be done and mentioned concerns about what and how.
What happened in
Renaissance meant re-birth. Naissance, thus meant birth. Going back into history, the First Birth happened in Africa, because the oldest human remains were found in
The Second Birth happened when
The Third Birth happened when the intellectual centre of Africa shifted to
One of the consequences of inviting new knowledge into your life and environment was, that it changed you. Nobody remained the same after engaging with it. One could choose to ignore new knowledge and not to engage with it. This was a dangerous path to follow, because no institution, nation or group, was complete on its own. There was too much happening around it for it to believe that it had all the answers.
Because Africa had lost the edge of
Africa was slow in this respect and TB wreaked havoc in
Malaria was still wreaking havoc in
He said that South Africans and Africans had a certain history, but there was currently an opportunity to transcend that past.
There were huge consequences to not having access to all the different kinds of knowledge. The female life expectancy in
A nation was vulnerable to penetration by forces like HIV/AIDS when there was a lot of traffic through its borders. South Africa, being the biggest economy in Africa, was in this position, with trucks carrying exported goods left for other African destinations and others bringing wares from other countries.
There were very poor countries like
In the cases of
The Dark Ages in Europe, 7th to 15th Century
What happened here in
The same happened later with Islam. There was a time when the Muslim Empire was at the forefront of mathematical and scientific knowledge. When theocracy took over, and the Mullahs and the priests started to control societies, they directed the population away from maths and science and in some cases contested its findings. Populations in this position stopped being open to knowledge from diverse sources. It had to be understood in terms of the history and circumstances and was not intended to be a judgement of their actions.
He felt that South Africans did not want to face up to what actually happened with education since the advent of democracy in
He showed a slide picturing a citadel, similar to the
The question was then: What was the place of safety in the modern world? The citadel did not provide any safety any longer, because a long distance missile could be launched from 3000 miles away, to destroy it.
Why was
During the period 800 BC to 1000 AD there was an explosion of new knowledge in the Greco-Roman Civilisation, algebra was created and the measurement for time was created. The
In the
In Sub-Saharan Africa there were internecine conflict and tribal wars. This was the era of Shaka, chasing a breakaway faction of his tribe into what was currently
Then the colonial period arrived that brought with it the conquests and destruction of kingdoms, but no expansion of the new knowledge into this culture. The colonists throttled the existing culture, but gave it no opportunity to engage with new knowledge. These colonial powers had no interest in the renaissance of the culture. They were only interested in occupying and extracting. The only place in Sub-Saharan Africa where the behaviour was different was in the
Apartheid and education
Under apartheid there was an expansion of access to new knowledge, but low funding. The schools were also never encouraged to explore science.
The anti-apartheid struggle was fought for a long time through school and schooling. The result was that it brought freedom much faster than would otherwise have been the case, but, its effects on education were devastating. It destroyed what little there was of a learning culture.
Education, or the knowledge project was set aside, because there was something else to fight for. There was general agreement within the ranks of the oppressed that they had to put all their energy into defeating apartheid so that they could embrace knowledge and have the renaissance that they wanted.
The natural expectation for 1994 was an explosion of knowledge energy, and a hunger for learning. A central part of the 20-year long struggle was a fight against what was called “gutter education” and for equal (to the standard in white schools) education.
The reality was that
Sub-Saharan Africa in particular
Kinds and sources of knowledge
The mindset of most people in
In
There were metaphysical ways of knowing, there were ideological ways of knowing, there were faith ways of knowing, traditional ways of knowing and they were all valid. There were metaphysical ways of knowing that there was a God or a force in the universe, and then there were scientific ways of knowing and they were not in opposition to each other. One had to choose the one that had the best resonance with the challenge facing it.
He related the anecdote of his grandmother that died 30 years ago. She was his inspiration throughout his life and until today when he faced a major problem, he talked to her. When somebody asked him what he thought about pebble-bed nuclear technology, he could not consult his grandmother. He had to consult a nuclear physicist who would know enough about the science to be able to give him an informed opinion.
He cited the example of the HIV/AIDS debate. The virology specialists would be the best people to consult on the science of the viruses, but there was no reason to disregard or ridicule the advice of somebody who said that a person’s body and immune system could be strengthened by eating certain vegetables and foods like garlic and beetroot. The two were not mutually exclusive. There it was the binary way of thinking again.
Five Humanising Factors
There were five things that made humans human. Firstly, humans as a species were unique in the animal kingdom in the sense that it had the longest childhood. In the case of most other mammals, the newborn could run within minutes of its birth for the sake of survival. For seven years a human child was helpless. It was being nurtured and taught what it was to be a human being.
Secondly, humans had the facility of organisation. When there was a problem, humans put together a task-team. In the olden days, there were few children and they were taught survival skills by the parents in the household. Now there were too many children. To solve the problem the human species came with the solution of the organisation of schools. There were organisations to cater for every human need.
Thirdly, humans had language. Language was the sounds that were made where a person was born, and he imitated those sounds and could communicate with other people making the same sounds, but in the modern world, it did not define the person, as in, became the person’s identity.
In a more primitive age, language had to be used to gage a person’s identity, and whether the person was potentially dangerous or belonged to a hostile tribe. It was a mode of defence, but in the modern world, that was no longer its role. However, in
He related an anecdote about him conversing with two very senior Cuban government officials three years ago. When he asked them what their biggest challenges were, they said that their infrastructure was falling apart, and they lacked access to English skills. English was used by lots of people, and to have access to those people
All the above mentioned advances took place in the most benign natural period in human history.
Future changes
Massive changes could be expected in the future which may change the face of the planet. After
200 000 years of human existence the population was 2,5 billion. That was in 1950. In within 40 years, in 1990, the number doubled. This population growth was unsustainable, because the resources simply did not match it.
The population of
There was no doubt that those power stations that Eskom was planning to build, were sorely needed. He could not understand why government did not speak to the people in this way. People were mobilising against the building of the power stations and the expected rate hikes, but government had to lay the facts before the people and educate them. They had to be told that without Eskom there would be no lights and no industry. This was not politics. This was dealing with the facts.
In 1950, the population of
He said that, from the way in which the communist youth at UWC were speaking, he got the sense that they thought that, in order to create a socialist country, one just had to declare it a socialist country, and the electricity, water and roads would just be there automatically. He asked how this was to come about.
A member interjected that they had to ask
He said it did not mean that the country could go the socialist route. People just had to realise exactly what they were doing. This was what Marx was trying to say. He tried to say, use these stages to build your competencies, by the time that you enter into the new heaven, people already had a new consciousness – the loved each other. They also had available to them incredible resources because they were part of the process of creating it.
Dalin said that this was what was facing us. According to Dalin you could not look back. You had to ask questions about the future.
What the government had not done, was to talk to the people about how damaging apartheid was and why it would be difficult to transcend it, and why all South Africans would have to make sacrifices. He said that he had been publicly critical in the past about the notion of service delivery, because it gave the population the idea that it had to sit and wait, and government would come and deliver. The question was: where was the responsibility of the citizen in this picture?
The citizens of
How would
He appealed to the Committee to ask the President to speak to the people on a Monday night at 19h00. He should ask all South Africans to be at their TV sets, and he had to sketch for the nation, the reality that the country was barrelling into an abyss, if all South Africans did not change the way they thought and acted. Politicians could have all the petty squabbles and all the political in-fights, but if they did not produce in the country, the competence to deal with the modern world, the country would descend into civil war and barbarism.
History would judge
South African dream
The dream of most South Africans was to have a house, transport, work and a happy family life, but there was nothing that prevented what happened in
He showed the picture of the vulture waiting for the child to die. That was not fanciful, it was real, and it could happen here. How long did it take for a culture to fall apart?
A member interjected that it was already happening.
How could we as South Africans and as Africans, respond? All the great thinkers from Imhotep and Confucius to Plato,
Some local socialists disagreed with the teachings of Mao. The Chinese people worked very hard. University students had to study very hard. If they did not live up to standards, they were kicked out. In
South Africans did not understand Marx, they did not understand the socialist world, they did not understand the capitalist world, they were creating a thing all on their own.
It had to lie within a nation’s competence to deal with all of the above issues as well as HIV/AIDS and TB..
He showed a slide that showed the contrast between the Cape Town City Bowl and harbour and a typical squatter township scene. The city represented roughly 20%-30% and the squatter scene 70%-80% of the population.
The government failed to tell South Africans that
Julius Malema’s idea was to take the mines and redistribute the wealth amongst the poor. If that happened, the situation for the poor would only be marginally better.
During the struggle, the idea of post-apartheid were schools like SACS, Bishops and the like. The reality was very different. The ANC had to redistribute the resources equitably amongst the schools, with the result that 8000 teachers had to leave.
He explained what happened during redistribution using the analogy of a father with 10 children. The one child looked exactly like him, another one looked a little bit like him, and the eight other children did not look like him at all. The one who looked like him asked the father for a pair of Nikes. He got it,. The next one, who looked a little bit like the father asked for a pair of shoes and he got a pair of North Stars. The ones who did not look like him at all, asked him for shoes, and he gave them a pair of flip-flops each.
Then the new constitution came into play and the constitution said you could not do that anymore. You had to take everything and divide it by all the children.
This part of the debate never happened in
Another issue that the president had to address, especially with the youth formations, was that nobody would be allowed to trash universities. The country simply could not afford it, if it wanted to advance in scientific and other fields and produce new knowledge. Development had to be at the top of everybody’s agenda.
He went on to show the slide headed: The Education Nexus: Our War Machine. It consisted of a diagram showing the PEDAGOGY surrounded by THE STATE at the top, MANAGEMENT and the CURRICULUM at the sides and LEARNERS at the bottom, and the LEARNERS extended down to the COMMUNITY at large. If that instrument did not work,
He explained that over 50% of the scientific research done in
Curriculum 2005
He discussed Curriculum 2005. He was head of Education at the time. Here politics was more important than the real situation on the ground. There was a watershed moment when a decision had to be made on whether Outcomes Based Education would be carried over into the high schools. There was enough evidence on the ground to prove that it was a bad curriculum, that it did not work in the South African context, and that it produced illiterate children Yet, pro-ANC decision makers in education voted for it to be perpetuated. They chose to ignore advice to the contrary. He had 29 points on a page that he wanted to talk to them about. He was accused of treason and undermining the struggle. Five years later the results spoke for itself.
There were three things South Africans had to do. Firstly, build the democracy. Secondly, South Africans had to make sure they could survive and be viable, to hold their own, and thirdly, South Africans had to deal with the legacy of apartheid.
The universities, with the permission of government, decided to have a national survey to measure academic literacy. A sample of 12 000 students from six universities took part. The universities were
For UWC it showed that out of 283 students admitted to the science faculty, only 59 were proficient.
If every child went to school and studied and every parent joined an organisation to make sure that children did go to school and learn, the country would change dramatically.
On the slide it showed students admitted to the science faculty on the basis of their matric results and there it showed that at UWC only one out of a total of 253 students were proficient. These students were bright and had huge potential, but they had to grow in confidence. They would only get there with very hard work every day, weekends included. This was what it would take
It was up to the leaders of the country to show, teach and inspire these young people to do it.
Discussion
The Chairperson said that the current presentation was a departure from the nature of the other presentations that the Committee listened to over the recent period. The other presentations dealt with practicalities and procedures. This presentation sketched the bigger picture and put all those other presentations in perspective.
The presentation also highlighted the responsibility that every South African had, to make the country work. It placed emphasis on self-criticism and the need for people’s minds to be tuned differently. The Prof was critical of the institution he himself represented.
Ms M Kubayi (ANC) said that the presentation was an eye-opener and pushed her to think about the real issues and the challenges that the country faced. She felt that they as the leadership was aware of the challenges, but had to start thinking about the building blocks needed to effect the change. When the Committee visited UWC, the Members became aware of the weight and the size of the task that rested upon the rector. There had to be co-operation and collaboration between the Committee and the rector in order to make sure that neither party failed at their respective tasks.
In terms of acknowledging some of the issues raised, she said when one reflected on the past, it was true that educational institutions were the hubs around which political mobilising and recruitment for different ideologies happened. The learning culture died at these institutions. The question was now how to turn the situation around to make learning appealing and to make the youth hungry for knowledge.
She was concerned about the low levels of postgraduate output of universities. This was the environment where new knowledge would come from. In the light of the fact that over 50% of all research in
Prof O’Connell replied that the enrolment was very low, because until very recently, Honours programmes were not funded in
Currently, there were few graduates and a plethora of opportunities, and research was not a very popular option. Universities did not pay much, but the academic life was a wonderful one.
Again a change of consciousness was necessary. Government tended to think of education as a product. There were certain inputs to make and there was an outcome. Education was reciprocity. It was an engagement process between teacher and student. It did not matter how well the teacher taught, if the student refused to learn, nothing was achieved. If the student thought that the engagement only required him to study two hours a day, then very little was achieved.
He said that he asked every member of Parliament that he talked to, to ask the president to speak to the people, to give people like himself the power to engage differently with young people, so that when a child swore at a teacher in class, there was a way to respond to that. If the president said that this was unacceptable in
There was a fundamental problem in terms of how government understood these relationships. It would only change if a strong message was sent from the very top, from the president, saying, this would not do here, in
The Chairperson said that it was a loaded input that required serious engagement and that the process had just begun. There would have to be follow-up sessions. It would be impossible to interrogate the input as a whole within a short space of time. It dealt with the need for a change in the way that society perceived and understood itself, and how to facilitate that.
Mr G Boinamo (DA) said if he looked at the origins of knowledge which occurred on the continent of Africa, and where Africa and
Mr G Lekgetho (ANC) said that he spoke to a colleague, a white person about the issue of poverty and destitution. He told his colleague that, in order to deal with poverty and destitution, people would have to adopt the destitute. The colleague said that adoption was not part of his culture. He said other cultures could be divisive and primitive. The Constitution said that
The issue of language instilled fear in him, because
Ms F Mushwana (ANC) who used to be a practising educator herself said the presentation helped her to acknowledge that in South Africa one did not only have to deal with South Africans, but also with the migrants arriving in South Africa in large numbers, from Southern Africa. She remembered a Southern African Teachers Union (SATU) conference in
She said that nobody had ever before pointed out the difference between
This history had to be retold to the children, because if it did not happen, children would choose sides with the enemy.
Ms W Nelson (ANC) asked about proficiency. She asked how one would deal with children right now to boost their literacy levels. She could see the difference between her older son, who had a higher literacy level and her younger son, who was a product of Outcomes Based education. She felt the dialogue had to open up.
Prof O’Connell said that the community had to take responsibility like it did during the struggle years to nurture children in the academic sense. They had to mobilize and get all the children into high school. They had to set up Saturday and after school extra classes. They had to create small bursaries to get them into university. Members could go and initiate that in their own areas.
Ms N Magazi (ANC) said that the traditional way in which black people were brought up was to build and not to destroy. Now there was a tendency to gain and extract as much as possible, and then to move away. There were a lot of contradictions.
Ms N Gina (ANC) asked how we could build social cohesion. When there was an event like the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup Tournament, it appeared as if there was progress in that regard, but she was unsure of that. Was it possible to gauge how the country was doing in terms of social cohesion. Could education help to create social cohesion? The issue of the 11 official languages should be discussed.
Mr S Makhubele (ANC) said there was a need for a complete paradigm shift as well as strong leadership to ensure that it happened. There was a need to consult with more intellectuals and to expose every other sector to this way of thinking. It started with individuals, with the members and how they interacted with their own children and from there in their interrelations with the wider circle.
Ms N Vukuza (COPE) said that said that she heard what Prof O’Connell said about the first, second, and third births as well as the onslaughts by TB, Malaria, and AIDS. They were events that played itself out in the physical dimension, but they were also metaphorical. One could also reason that knowledge was metaphorical. She said that South Africans were witnessing deaths as a result of HIV, but this physical death was a metaphor for the death of the knowledge that preceded it, of which the physical death was a result.
Knowledge, as Prof O’Connell used it, was for her a point of agitation (controversy), because she did not know whose knowledge he was referring to. She did not understand the definition of knowledge in this case. Did knowledge mean self sufficiency? Did it mean anticipating the future?
She said that he was also arguing for a new consciousness, which meant that he was arguing for two dialectically opposing views to come together and form a new consciousness. She could not understand what positive things she could take from her experiences under apartheid like Bantu Education and what was it that she could preserve from apartheid which had good practices within a bad policy framework. In her mind
She was at Milltown and at
She asked him what his diagnosis was of why
She referred to the big traditional medicine market in
She said that Africans did not have to feel inferior in the knowledge arena , because
She had to go to
Prof O’Connell said the challenge was the urbanisation that was taking place. In traditional society there were social norms and values and elders to keep it in place. With urbanisation all of that fell away and there was nothing to replace it. There was a need to devise a way where the best of the old could engage with the best of the new
There was a lie that all governments told their people. They said that the resources would always match the needs of the population which is shown on the first graph.
The second graph showed the hope that somewhere along the line the people would realise that it was unsustainable and that they would start doing things to reduce their carbon footprint like recycling, using less water and curbing the population growth to the extent that they stayed just within the limits of what the country could provide.
The third graph showed the reality. The world had already gone over the threshold. The ecology has already been destroyed. What was likely to happen unless all people made some dramatic changes was that it would continue beyond the point of sustainability for a while, and then it would come crashing down and it would be like it was during the dark ages in
(Please refer to attached document)
It was a good sentiment to decide to adopt children instead of having your own. The Catholic church had to decide to support condoms, to curb the population and to stop HIV/AIDS.
The hope-model was the one
He said that he was beaten at school as a form of discipline. He was not advocating it. He thought that this western thing of not talking sternly to children was not wise, because it was not like that in nature. In nature animals discipline their young physically in order to show them the right way, and in the interest of their own survival.
The Government decided that corporal punishment was out of the question. What other lever did a teacher have to maintain order amongst 40 learners in the classroom? Nothing, except the teacher’s ability to keep the children involved to the extent that they do not misbehave. How likely was that to happen and how many teachers were able to do that? The reality was that in most classes teachers spent half the period trying to restore order in the knowledge that they had no levers with which to restore the order. The children had all the power.
Now that all the power had been given to children, the children had to be in the game, and the parents and the community had to put the child in the game. When apartheid was disbanded, there was no process to support community organisations to grow in order to address the next wave of challenges. Community organisations all disbanded and said that government and councillors was there to address the needs of the people. The spirit of community service and networking was still alive and had to be revived and utilised to deal with the challenges of, for example education.
The Chairperson said members had suggested that there should be further engagement around the subjects under discussion. The question that came up for him was, whether government was trying to find easy solutions to what were extremely complex questions. What was actually happening in South African society and beyond? It was the duty of the Committee to make sure that the debate continued beyond the confines of this Committee. At some point the Committee would invite the leaderships of the strategic youth formations, the leadership of student bodies at the institutions of higher learning, etc, but it would have to be thought through. This was a weighty issue and it could not be handled in a piecemeal fashion.
He was told by members of the intelligence community that there was a world in
Part of the collaboration between the Committee and the SETA’s and the Department of Higher Education and Training would be the development of a training manual to address some of the issues touched on during this discussion. It could give rise to a leadership programme beyond party political lines, supported by government.
He recalled Prof O’Connell’s earlier mention of making far reaching decisions, without thinking it through. Everybody spoke about the skills revolution, but what exactly was meant by it.? It was a buzzword used by business, and workers. The slogan was right, but in practise what did it entail? It had to be thought through.
He said that Prof O’Connell had said that the State of
Prof O’Connell re-iterated firstly, that, irrespective of the amount of money and resources spent on education, as long as the learner did not engage, nothing was accomplished, and secondly, that everybody expected that the struggle would produce the new consciousness, but it did not, which meant that society had to reflect on how to engineer a modern learning culture as a matter of urgency.
Adoption of minutes and reports
The Chairperson went on to other points on the agenda.
The meeting adopted the minutes of a Committee meeting that took place on 5 May 2010.
The Draft Report of the oversight visits to the Universities of Zululand and the
was adopted.
The meeting adopted the minutes of the Committee meeting that took place on 12 May 2010.
The Draft Report on the NSF and NSA was adopted.
The meeting was adjourned.
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