Asmal’s Tertiary Education Castles in the Air
During the second school term the education ministry released a White Paper on the restructuring of tertiary education in South Africa. The plan involved the twenty-one university institutions, including the nine “bush” colleges created in terms of the Apartheid Christian-National Education plan, teacher training colleges, some fifteen technikons, about one hundred and fifteen technical colleges and several private and semi-private technical and academic institutions. One of the features of the over arching plan is the merging of institutions under the tutelage of selected universities, on a regional basis.
So under the guidance of such universities, technikons and teacher colleges will produce the technical and professional men and women needed to promote the all-round social, economic and cultural development of the country. In this way, it is claimed, the maximum and optimum use can be made of the material facilities and the human resources available in the country.
The universities themselves will be merged in a series of regional networks to make co-operation easier. But they will be classifies according to the specific aims for each of some four groups. Such aims cover both the scope of their studies and, noticeably, the level of study to which their students can rise.
In the lowest of these categories students will study for diplomas and (the simpler?) first degrees. Such universities will not award Master’s degrees or Doctorates nor will they conduct pioneering research at the very frontiers of advanced knowledge. The universities which work in this area will be the nucleus of any cluster that results from merging the lower-rank universities, colleges and technikons. It will be recalled that the Eiselen-Verwoerd “bush” colleges were each linked by some academic dog-chain to a leading (Afrikaner) university: UWC to Stellenbosch; Fort Hare to Potchefstroom University for Christian-National Higher Education; Durban-Westville to Natal, and Rand Afrikaans University and Turfloop and Ngoye to Pretoria University.
If indeed the Asmal plan is to place a fully-fledged university at the center of each merger, Dr Verwoerd will rise from beyond and cry: “Bravo! Mooi So!” It seems all too familiar.
On October 5 in Parliament’s session to celebrate World Educators’/Teachers’ Day it was announced that all teacher/educator training colleges would fall under the jurisdiction of universities as of 1 January 2001. It was claimed in the statement that this would raise the standards of educator-training and the status of teachers in their profession.
This change comes in the wake of the nation-wide collapse and closure of many teacher-training institutions and a staggering decrease in the enrolment of student-teachers at both training colleges and university education faculties. Minister Asmal provided a carrot to lure candidates to the colleges that are to be linked to specified universities. Such candidates will be given financial help from the university student-support funds.
Every study during the past two decades has shown that South Africa’s economic growth has not kept pace with population growth. This is the “race” – face of the country’s ongoing colonial stagnation. It has, in turn, produced frightening distortions in tertiary education. In advanced industrialised countries the ratio of university student numbers to numbers at technikons and technical colleges is 1 to 10. That ensures a steady flow of trained persons for the different economies. In South Africa in 1990 the number of students at the 21 universities totalled about 300000. The number at technical institutions was about 80000. There were fewer technikons (15) than universities (21); and there were far too few jobs for the increasing number of school-leaving students. There is no realistic chance that this state of affairs will change in the short or medium term.
In the White Paper there is a detailed count of the number of students enrolled at the universities during the 1990s. The stark realities that emerge are that the number of students who gain university-entrance grades (matriculation) has dropped from about 90000 to 63000; and that most of the students do not satisfy the entrance requirements of the universities which provide a fairly full range of degree studies. Nor do the students provide a big enough pool upon which the technikons can draw to establish faculties requiring mathematics and the physical and life sciences. The further result of these distortions is that the older universities have a faculty range quite different from that of the special ethnic (bush!) colleges created under the Eiselen-Verwoerd/Christian-National tribalisation of the universities. The ways in which the Asmal mergers will take place are virtually predetermined or predestined in CNE Calvinistic terms.
An extension of such distortions is related to the chronic shortage of adequately trained technicians and others with higher qualifications. Both the colour-bar and the built-in nature of South Africa’s economy decreed that such workers and professionals be drawn mainly from the one eighth of the populace classified “White”. That was an insuperable obstacle in the path of economic growth.
A third factor is that while student numbers at Unisa and Vista “distance” universities are greater than those at the 19 other institutions, the majority of students at these two students are know to follow degree courses that offer little hope of employment in a stagnant economy. There is a recurrent cry that the large Arts and Social Sciences faculties at these institutions and many of the Verwoerdian (ethnic) colleges do not reflect the best use of the material, financial and human resources being utilised at present.
In short, while the proposals to restructure the system are being discussed and planned, the vitally necessary basic important conditions for success in any area just do not exist. What is worse is that the pre-conditions are crumbling before our very eyes.
Researchers based at universities like Cape Town, Witwatersrand, Stellenbosch and Pretoria may gather under their wings other universities intended just to provide bread-and-butter degrees and to suckle technikons and teachers’ colleges. The Asmal transformation cannot claim to be driven by sound educational considerations. The National Committee of University Principals has strongly criticised the White Paper’s proposals as unworkable, costly and unaware of the larger numbers of academic staff that would be needed. This at the very juncture when all the universities are cutting staff numbers drastically, privatising support services like cleaning and security to save money. And even as they do this the numbers of students have fallen as drastically as the debts of the universities have risen.
The very teams that have embarked upon formulating the intended structural changes in tertiary education under the leadership of education ministers have themselves created the increasingly more rickety primary and secondary schooling systems that have emerged over the past twenty years.
It would be neither wrong nor unfair to say that the Asmal plan is essentially a programme to build tertiary education castles in the air. That education in this country needs a thorough-going focused reconstruction is obvious. That development in education is both the spur to and the product of economic growth and democratic change is equally obvious to some. But the question arises as to whether the main driving force behind the new tertiary education plan stems from such considerations.
The track records of the governments of both PW Botha and FW de Klerk before 1994 and those of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki after that show a marked continuity. They all display a decided dependence on the economic and political policies forced upon South Africa by the rampant, globalised system of neo-colonialism salted with a dash of neo-liberal and economics and politics. It is true that colour and “race” discrimination has been expunged from the law books. But it is also too true that with its framework of law in the “new South Africa” our society is gripped tightly in the strait-jacket of economic structures and political requisites that more and more clearly each day are recognised as dictates of those who drive the process – globalisation – in which, as far as possible every country has its economic life and political controls locked into the interests of the dominant economic blocs of North America, Europe and Japan. The 35:1 and 41:1 pupil-teacher ratios in secondary and primary schools respectively, the retrenchment of 40000 teachers before 2000 and the further “redeployment” of 23000 teachers by December 2000, the replacement of “free education” by fee-education, and many other “adjustments” spring from the Structural Adjustment Programme (GEAR) imposed on SA by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund from 1985 to the present day. These facts must never be forgotten if we are to understand where the education structural adjustment programmes stem from.
So now it is the turn of tertiary education, which includes ABET – Adult Basic Education and Training – and the additive qualifications gained by men and women outside formal educational institutions, that is, those evaluated in terms of the National Qualifications Authority’s areas of operation.
The White Paper on tertiary education is indeed a prescription for a black future in tertiary education at all levels. Reconstruction is as necessary as the perpetuation of the present system is unnecessary and abominable. But the Asmal plan is incapable of achieving the necessary essential reconstruction.
[THE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL, PUBLISHED BY NUPSAW EDUCATION SECTOR, NOVEMBER - NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2000]
EDITOR: Mrs. HN Kies, 15 Upper Bloem Street, Cape Town, 8001
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