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THE NEED FOR A CULTURE OF LEARNING AND TEACHING

"It sometimes seems to me that our days are poisoned with too many words. Words said not meant. Words said and meant. Words divorced from feeling. Wounding words. Words that conceal. Words that reduce. Dead words".

These are opening lines of an essay by one of the great contemporary writers of Africa, Ben Okri. I thought I should begin with these words for two reasons.

Firstly because I thought I would gain respect among all the learned men and women present here today when they realise that I can also quote a few lines. Secondly I thought I should acknowledge from the beginning that what I am going to say are words, and should be seen in the same manner as Okri describes words in general. But most importantly, I thought that this is the most appropriate way of describing the reason why we are gathered here today.

Our country's higher education sector is currently characterised by too many words. The different stakeholders are exchanging accusations against one another. Students against management, management against staff and workers, students against students, students against the ministry of education and the government as a whole, leaders of institutions against the minister of education and his department - the list is endless. Just this last week we have witnessed scenes of confrontation between some students and management in more than five of our institutions. We also told that students will be marching to various centres of government in the coming weeks.

And in everyone of these situation, without exception, people exchange words, 'wounding words, words that reduce'. More than just words, they even exchange other objects, like stones, knives, sticks, dustbins, golf sticks, baseball and cricket bats, and even gunfire. It is because of all these exchanges of words and the other objects that accompany them that we have decided to gather here today.

We have to say that it is now time for us to reduce these words because, as Ben Okri says, they are now too many.

But how can we say we want to reduce words when the whole business of higher education is the production of knowledge, whose main tools are words? Are we not coming to negate the very mission of the higher education sector, which is to produce knowledge through an exchange of ideas?

Allow me to respond to these questions, which I am sure you are all beginning to ask, by using Ben Okri again. Okri says:

"The greatest art was probably born from a profound and terrible silence out of which the deepest enigmas of our lives cry: Why are we here? What is the point of it all? How can we know peace and live joy? Why be born in order to die? Why this difficult one way journey between the two mysteries?

Out of the wonder and agony of being come these cries and questions and the endless stream of words with which to order human life and quieten the human heart in the midst of our living and our distress."

This is what I believe we are here to call for in our higher education sector. The culture of learning and teaching in higher education means a culture of silent reflection, of deep thought, of curiosity and questioning, of exploration and examination, of thought, search for more questions and more answers, of investigation, of more search and research. Only words that emerge out of these silent activities begin to bring us nearer to an understanding of the matters that we are grappling with as a human species. It is these activities that combine knowledge, new knowledge and the unknown, to produce the understanding and the programmes of action that will enable us to address the miseries of the people and help to make their lives better.

Yet even as we engage in this quite reflection, this silent activity, we must allow our own history and past experiences to inform our decisions as to the correct path that we must follow for us to overcome the inherited legacy of ignorance and the poverty of the spirit; we must begin by understanding our own history, where we come from and where we are going. A people that do not understand their own history are unable to comprehend the present, let alone engage in strategic thinking for the future.

On 16 June 1976, almost 21 years ago, this country experienced an uprising which shook the pillars of the apartheid system to the core and precipitated the birth of the miracle that we refer to as the new democratic South Africa.

This uprising, which was led by students, was the continuation of a tradition of struggle that stretches back to our colonial past. The significance of the June 16 uprising is that our youth and students confronted what was perceived as a formidable enemy, hundreds of our best youth and students laid down their lives, and thousands of others left the borders of this country and joined the liberation movement.

They engaged in struggle so that future generations may breathe the purified air of freedom, so that the youth of today could participate in the process of improving themselves and developing their country. The youth and students of that time responded to the call they heard - the cries of anguish emanating from a nation trampled under the jackboot of apartheid tyranny.

We can justifiable be proud of that generation because it understood its calling and rose to the challenge of the times.

In our moment of silent reflection, one moment of deep thought and exploration, have we determined what are the lessons of the June 16 uprising? This is a question directed more at our youth and students today, many of whom were mere toddlers at the time. This is not intended to single them out as a particular group in society but it is in recognition of the fact that they are our future leaders and the future belongs to them.

The question that begs for an answer with a growing sense of urgency is whether we have achieved the ideals for which so many of our best youth and students sacrificed their lives. During the moments of deep thought and reflection we must come up with answers to the vexing questions of the day.

We cannot do that through the usage of dead words, words said without meaning and words without content. We cannot do that through the trashing of our institutions and the destruction of valuable property. This is tantamount to the betrayal of the memory of the generation of 1976 and many more who came before them.

The country cries out for salvation. It is yearning for development, for progress and the upliftment of our people who have been dehumanised for all these years.

It is only through the acquisition of knowledge, the production of engineers, scientists, doctors and teachers that we shall be able to conquer the scourge of poverty, disease and underdevelopment, which is the lot of our people today.

We are therefore here to call upon all stakeholders in education to begin working together with the government and the country as a whole to ensure that the culture of learning and teaching is developed in our institutions. It is time we began to transform our higher education institutions into centres of knowledge production second to none in Africa and the world.

The task of developing the culture of learning and teaching in our institutions is indeed a very urgent one. Our institutions need to produce the human resources that are so crucial for the Reconstruction and Development Programme to succeed. We cannot meet the basic needs of our people if we are unable to produce the necessary knowledge and skills to help us develop mechanisms for doing so. We have the potential, but we need to direct our energies to the national task at hand, and bring all our forces together to face the challenge of addressing the backlogs facing our country in skills and knowledge.

What is it that we need to do in order to meet these challenges? Firstly we need to go back to basics, and ensure that all our institutions are engaged primarily in the business of learning and teaching. We must see all our institutions showing characteristics of serious pursuance of academic excellence in all their activities. Students must attend lectures, write their assignments, do their projects, read, read and read. Academic work needs a lot of discipline. We cannot afford to have students who can hardly sit and concentrate on reading for more than two hours.

Our lecturers should also commit themselves to teaching. In this regard I must say that to me teaching means being able to communicate with all students regardless of who they are. We are all aware that many of our students come from disadvantaged education backgrounds and therefore come to universities and technikons underprepared. We have a responsibility as institutions to teach these students and to enable them to succeed. Lecturers therefore need to take seriously the task of developing innovative and relevant methods of teaching. This will be their contribution to the culture of learning and teaching.

We would not have achieved anything in our campaign to develop this culture I we do not develop the culture of research, especially among black students. The level of research among blacks is far from satisfactory. We therefore have a challenge to produce black researchers for the country as a matter of urgency.

Let me hasten to say that I do not believe that when I talk about teaching and research I am talking about activities that should be done by some institutions and not others. I believe that excellent research will grow out of excellent teaching. Therefore all institutions should become teaching institutions. Similarly, all of them should become research institutions.

All these we can achieve if we begin to engage differently with one another, and not in the same old ways. All of us, the government, the leaders of institutions, the students and the workers must commit ourselves to new ways of engagement, ones that reflect our commitment to the culture of learning and teaching.

I therefore want to challenge our student movements to commit themselves to a new approach to words. I believe that there are many words that are now being bandied around the student movements. The big question is whether these words are a product of careful consideration and reflection. One of these words is 'transformation'. It is our task as students to rescue this word from becoming a dead word, a word that has no substances, by ensuring that we liberate it from misuse and give it its proper content based on meaningful debate and careful interrogation. The students have to take the lead in subjecting their notions and transformation to rigorous intellectual scrutiny and constant debate.

To the management of institutions, I believe it is high time we also gave serious consideration to our commitment to transformation and to a culture of management through participation.

Higher education institutions are supposed to be bastions of dialogue and debate. This needs to be reflected even in their management styles. Only a participatory style of management can contribute meaningfully to the culture of learning and teaching.

I therefore have pleasure to launch this campaign and call upon all the stakeholders in the higher education sector to make our institutions work for us. Let me give the last word to Okri once again: "To poison a nation, poison its stories".

Let us rescue our stories from poison, so that we may tell good stories, for 'when we have made experience of chaos into a story we have transformed it, made sense of it, transmuted experience, domesticated the chaos'.

<EOD>