Putting the “high” into Higher Education

As a BA graduate at a university in Cape Town, I am well-placed to know that there are many ways UCT students get high. The fresh sweep of wind as they walk down Jammie stairs… the pump of adrenalin as the short loan book they wanted is still in… meeting a last minute hand-in deadline. There’s other less legal (but equally natural) highs, but we’ll save that for someone else’s blog.

What I’m interest in is what it is that puts the “high” into Higher Education. I started think of this while reading Ronald Barnett’s (1990) book, The Idea of Higher Education. In it, he writes:

It is not “further education”: it is not simply more of what has gone before. Rather, the term is a reference to a level of individual development over and above that normally implied by the term “education”.

(1990: 6)

I thought this was such an interesting idea on two levels. Firstly, it reminded me again about the way that our use of language both reflects and shapes our practices as human beings. Gee (2008: 97) gives another educational example of this. When we say “The teacher teaches the student French”, our words imply that French is being passed down whole from the teacher to the student. As an educator, I know that this kind of one-way flow of information doesn’t result in deep learning. So even in its simplicity, this statement embodies particular notions of how teaching and learning should take place.

This leads me to the second aspect of Barnett’s idea that I find interesting. What are the values implicit in referring to after-school education as “higher”? It could be said that once you attend a higher education institution, you’re ready to move higher up the social ladder. Or maybe a higher education allows one to access texts (of all sorts) at a higher, more sophisticated level. And do you only achieve “highness” once you’ve graduated, or is the whole experience, from the very first day, a journey up an inclining hill?

Barnett argues that the thing that makes higher education “high” is the sense of criticality that should be built in to it. Students shouldn’t simply acquire particular competencies. Rather, they should be able to adopt sceptical stances in relation to the truth claims and practices they come across. Barnett explains:

Students must be encouraged to stand back, reflect deeply, consider ethical dimensions of both thought and action, to understand the place of their knowledge in higher education, to glimpse something of what it may be, to gain their own independence from all that they learn, think and do.

(1990: 78)

The challenge is how, in a skills building course like the one I teach on, where we’re teaching students how to do things the right way, to encourage them to be sceptical. They can be as critical as they like about what I teach, but if they don’t use the kind of language that I teach them in a professional report they will a) fail the assignment and b) not be adequately prepared when they go to work.

There’s tons of research about this, which leads me to a tentative theory on what is high about higher education. Maybe it’s that there’s a whole dynamic body of literature around learning and teaching, which is devoted to understanding better what happens in academic classrooms, departments, faculties and institutions. It’s not a stagnant body; it’s always growing and developing – reaching higher levels of understanding, if you will. That’s why I’m excited to be part of this field of enquiry.

Eye cream and Higher Ed?

Did you see that South Africa’s experiencing a “Surge in the cost of higher education”? Click here to see the article from The Mercury on 3 January which compares and contrasts the price hikes across regions, institutions and disciplines.

Here are some quotes, if you don’t want to read the whole thing:

“School-leavers (at Durban University of Technology) can expect to pay between R19 000 and R30 000 for first-year tuition for some of the more popular programmes, which include journalism (R24 160), emergency medical services (R19 080), nursing (R29 990) and human resources (R24 810).”

“A first-year student pursuing a degree (at Wits)  in engineering in 2012 would have forked out at least R30 630, education R20 810, accounting R33 296 and medicine R43 520.”

“At the University of Cape Town, first-year tuition in 2013 for degree programmes ranged from R39 500 to R51 000 for aspiring accountants, from R44 000 to R46 000 for engineers and R42 500 for fine arts.”

The other day I was at Clicks, buying eye cream (fascinating story, Gabi), and I had a choice between two brands. The one was way cheaper then the other. So… I took the expensive one, thinking that it must be a better product and there can be no price put on me not becoming a wrinkly old woman before my time.

Is this what’s happening with universities today? By being so expensive, are universities carving out a space as the expensive eye cream of education opportunities?  I’m not discounting bursaries and scholarships and other initiatives helping to change student demographics, but I’m a little creeped out at the notion of universities remaining the preserve of the upper-class (much like eye cream, actually), thereby perpetuating the social order as we know it, and ensuring that the rich stay rich and the poor don’t stand a chance.

I wonder if there’s a cream to fight frown lines…

Musings after the passing of an intellectual

I read in the Cape Times this morning about the passing of Prof Jakes Gerwel. I’d never heard of him before today, but he sounds like a great man. I think people often think of academics as quite insular, focussed on creating new knowledge in their disciplines with no connection to the outside world. Reading about Prof Gerwel’s impact on UWC, Rhodes, and South Africa as a whole reminded me that academia is completely connected to society, and the qualities of integrity, courage and dignity transcend context.

I loved this quote in the article:

Gerwel stated that he could not “in conscience, in truth, educate or lead education towards the reproduction and maintenance of a social order which is undemocratic, discriminatory, exploitative and repressive”. Universities, instead, had to promote “through example a democratic culture”.

This reminds me that universities have an important responsibility to be more then just a place where kids get ready to find jobs. They have a part to play in shaping the South Africa of the future through the priorities that they set, their focus areas and the ideologies that they adopt.

It gets complicated once universities are accounting for the decisions that they make to a higher educational body, who may try to regulate them or steer them in a particular direction when it comes to things like research focus areas or admissions. There’s a delicate balance in this context between maintaining regulatory standards and something akin  to external control, and quite quickly universities could lose their independence and, hence, the ability to carry out Gerwel’s ideals.

Gerwel eschews leading education towards the “reproduction and maintenance of a social order…”. The question that arises for me is whether we, as South Africans, are satisfied with the current social order? And if we aren’t, how can we harness the potential of universities to be spaces of transformation? That’s what I’ll be pondering in the wake of this influential academic’s passing.