Are we where we should be in transformational education? This article places a premium on the role of universities in transformation.
Universities are linked to communities. Nevertheless universities are focused on teaching, research and getting people degrees.
To what extent do they transcend this inward mandate and contribute to peace and stability, the national question, the land question, corruption, the artificial economy, conflict resolution, poverty, Brics, modernisation and substantive transformation?
For any African university, these are fundamental niches because this is a way of pulling towards the reality of living and teaching in Africa.
In SA, apart from the issues of poverty and underdevelopment, there is a need to preserve cultural and ethical values in an age of globalisation.
In the 1930s, Carlton J Hayes wrote France: a Nation of Patriots in which he argued that the French were the most patriotic people on earth.
Thirty years later Eugen Weber responded to Hayes’s claim by asking if they were indeed so, how did they become so? How did they move from being a land of thousands of hamlets and villages to being the proud citizens claimed by Hayes?
Weber’s thinking reveals a deliberate and systematic process over time, by which the state inserted itself into the consciousness and subconsciousness of the people – much like Coca-Cola, for example, has managed to do globally.
The state established its authority over many social structures and functions, and used them to advance this agenda. It forced the adoption of a single national language, French.
The point is that the transformation from peasants to French citizens was no accident. Neither was the creation of the German war culture after 1933; nor was the legal and social separation of the people of South Africa into racial and ethnic groups.
These were deliberate programmes to create different senses of belonging and affiliation, based on identities that were different from, and even opposed to, others. Each programme was transformational and depended on a certain kind of education in support of specific goals.
The underlying assumption was that humans could be taught to be whatever it was decided they should be, exclusive or inclusive.
History indicates that the inevitable consequence of an agenda of exclusivity is conflict. You are forced to keep some in and, depending on what you wish to achieve through your ideology, others out.
This requires constant vigilance and ruthless action. History suggests such systems cannot endure. Exclusivity even in the animal kingdom is a high-risk strategy. Animals that feed on a single plant or prey species are at the mercy of environmental change.
The prospects of a species are greatly enhanced if the pool is enriched. Why do we have such difficulty with diversity?
Why do we consistently create ways of differentiating ourselves from others and claim a special, often superior, status as a consequence of our distinguishing features?
Why do we consistently use education in this way? Is this a response to a distinct human need? Is it our challenge to transcend the fragmentation of the apartheid legacy by creating a strong national identity and by pursuing our national goals assiduously? And what does this mean for Zimbabweans, who are now competing with “our” people for “our” jobs?
What are our starting points for understanding ourselves and changing human behaviour? What do we do with this understanding?
What is the special role of the university in conflict transformation, reconstruction and peace-building in Africa? Is the notion of a common humanity with inalienable rights simply a social construct?
Perhaps we should turn to physical science for reassurance that, in proposing the possibility of a brave new world of co-operation and collaboration we are not being fanciful.
Watson and Crick, who received a Nobel Prize for solving the mystery of the chromosome and discovering the double helix structure of DNA, believe the essence of life is complementarity. They suggested no life is possible unless a pair of chromosomes co-operate.
This has resonance in the social world.
Poet John Donne’s prescient line “No man is an island” speaks to a boundary-less planet where a butterfly flapping its wings in China has an effect on the other side of the world.
Our increasingly interconnected and diverse world requires that people have the insight, skill and capacities to handle human relationships and differences constructively.
Behaviourists have argued we are essentially motivated by self-interest.
However there have been people like Govan Mbeki, Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa who gave up everything to serve, and whose response to brutish behaviour was to extend a hand of reconciliation.
Manuel Castell, in his brilliant analysis of development in this digital age, argues the answer is education together with strong networks.
With social constructs such as inalienable rights to life, justice and peace, we have sought to create a world characterised by equity, freedom, democracy, truth, justice, respect and responsibility.
It is brave and visionary, but also necessary that our universities continue to deepen understanding and engagement.
Mphumzi Mdekazi is trying to be a PhD student at Stellenbosch University...