Bounds of Democracy docx

Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Published by HSRC Press Private Bag X9182, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa www.hsrcpress.ac.za First published 2009 ISBN (soft cover) 978-0-7969-2271-7 ISBN (pdf) 978-0-7969-2272-4 © 2009 Human Sciences Research Council The views expressed in this publication are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Human Sciences Research Council (‘the Council’) or indicate that the Council endorses the views of the author. In quoting from this publication, readers are advised to attribute the source of the information to the individual author concerned and not to the Council. Copyedited by Peter Lague Typeset by Baseline Publishing Services Cover by Fuel Design Printed by Distributed in Africa by Blue Weaver Tel: +27 (0) 21 701 4477; Fax: +27 (0) 21 701 7302 www.oneworldbooks.com Distributed in Europe and the United Kingdom by Eurospan Distribution Services (EDS) Tel: +44 (0) 20 7240 0856; Fax: +44 (0) 20 7379 0609 www.eurospanbookstore.com Distributed in North America by Independent Publishers Group (IPG) Call toll-free: (800) 888 4741; Fax: +1 (312) 337 5985 www.ipgbook.com Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za Contents Foreword iv Abbreviations viii 1 Cultivating humanity in the contemporary world 1 2 Varieties of educational tragedy 13 3 Epistemic values in curriculum transformation 28 4 Shifting the embedded culture of Higher Education 40 5 Should a democrat be in favour of academic freedom? 55 6 Entitlement and achievement in education 69 7 Stakeholders and senates: The governance of higher education institutions in South Africa 87 8 Higher knowledge and the functions of Higher Education 113 9 Learning delivery models in Higher Education in South Africa 138 Bibliography 169 Index 172 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za iv Foreword Since the 1970s Wally Morrow’s voice has provided a vigorous and independent commentary on educational policy and practice in South Africa. In this collection of essays, which spans a period from the late 1980s to the early years of the new century, he turns his attention to teaching in higher education in South Africa. 1 The central focus of Morrow’s critical examination of key issues before, during and since the transition in 1994 to a democratic order is the conflict between strong populist views of democracy and the nature of Higher Education, and consequent necessary conditions for it to flourish. Its main theme is a concern that the understandable enthusiasm for democracy in South Africa in the 1990s has undermined the idea of expertise in Higher Education. Higher Education, Morrow argues, cannot be democratic. Framing the defence of academic practice in the essays in this collection is the metaphor of bounds, a concept that reflects an ambiguity that Morrow sets out to illuminate. On the one hand, our thinking about Higher Education is bounded in the sense of being limited by certain kinds of corrupting assumptions about the relationship between education and democracy. On the other hand, the defence of academic practice demands that bounds be set against the intrusion of assumptions and practices that threaten to undermine it. Deliberation about education is both inevitably bounded by its past and present contexts, and in need of a capacity to resist elements of that context that set boundaries on imagining new ways to conduct academic practice in the future. Each essay in the collection reflects these concerns. Essay 1, ‘Cultivating humanity in the contemporary world’, responds to the idea that values education is about the development of character, understood as a ‘stable disposition of individuals’. Prioritising character in our understanding of education, it argues, threatens to bind us to a form of individualism that is integral to instrumental rationality, making it difficult for us to retain a sense of the communal ideals that shaped our transition to democracy, and to talk of other goals – like patriotism. Instead, Morrow urges us to focus on the educative practice of discussion in thinking about values in education. Essay 2, ‘Varieties of educational tragedy’, discusses the bounds placed on Higher Education by simplistic thinking about equity. Concentrating Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za v attention on liberation, understood as the elimination of poverty, distracts us from paying proper attention to the need for economic development. Instead of being correlative, equity and development are in tension and need to be balanced. Yet educational policy in South Africa is driven by considerations of equity and redress, which tend to be privileged above other considerations. If we lose sight of the values of Higher Education, Morrow warns, we will be left only with post-secondary education. Educational tragedy looms when simplifying choices are made. The potential for tragedy lurks in other educational fashions and fads. Essay 3, ‘Epistemic values in curriculum transformation’, takes the reader closer to the argumentative heart of the collection. While curricular content does need to be modified, our debates about this process tend to be bounded by the rhetoric of transformation and reform, often premised on the assumption that any change must be good. But only some kinds of curriculum change would represent an improvement and they should be grounded on epistemic values, which constitute the grammar of academic practice as disinterested inquiry. Essay 4, ‘Shifting the embedded culture of Higher Education’, turns the argument to ways in which reflection on Higher Education is bounded not only by new fads, but by aspects of the traditional culture of Higher Education as well. Depending on a situation of co-presence, 2 as well as the assumption that Higher Education institutions can only be competitively independent, this traditional model is enormously expensive. Massification of Higher Education requires thinking in different ways about how to provide it. Breaking down these boundaries leads towards open learning, to teaching as resource-based learning. Essay 5, ‘Should a democrat be in favour of academic freedom?’, was a response to the O’Brien Affair 3 but now stands as a response to the threat to academic freedom from the ‘marketisation’ of Higher Education. While one possible understanding of academic freedom might cast it as in conflict with democratic principles, Morrow’s argument is that a democrat should be in favour of academic freedom. Drawing on an intricate discussion of ‘truth’ and its significance in educational practice, he shows that what is constitutive of academic practice must be distinguished from what is instrumentally valuable. There follow two essays widely read and hopefully influential since their earlier publication. Essay 6, ‘Entitlement and achievement in education’, can Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za vi BOUNDS OF DEMOCRACY be read as a comment on the bounds set by protest politics on the possibilities for moving beyond the conditions that provoked struggle politics. While it has become popular to think that Higher Education is simply obtainable by the demands of agents, such demands misunderstand the role of agency in achievement. Epistemological as against formal access depends not only on teaching but also on the efforts of the learner. Too strong an emphasis on entitlement undermines academic values and the achievement of becoming a participant in academic practices. ‘In the same way’, writes the author, ‘as no one else can do my running for me, no one else can do my learning for me.’ In ‘Stakeholders and senates: The governance of higher education institutions in South Africa’ (Essay 7), Morrow defends higher education institutions against the ambiguous democratic demands of stakeholder politics for the transformation of universities. Academic practices cannot be egalitarian; they are not transparent and senates are the appropriate governing bodies of universities. In a warning that might equally be directed at the reduced power of senates that has accompanied the growth of corporate, executive university management, Morrow observes that if we lose a sense of the role of senates then we will lose our sense of higher knowledge and Higher Education. Essay 8, ‘Higher knowledge and the functions of Higher Education’, poses the question: what is Higher Education for? This essay warns that modern societies depend on Higher Education and, if we lose our understanding of higher knowledge, South Africa’s aspirations to become a modern society will not come to pass; such knowledge cannot be bought off the shelf. To deny the distinction between higher and other kinds of knowledge undermines Higher Education, which must be distinguished from post-secondary education. Morrow’s argument is that the function of Higher Education is to constitute, distribute and generate higher knowledge. The collection concludes with a final essay on provision: ‘Learning delivery models in Higher Education in South Africa’. While different ways of delivering Higher Education have become commonplace, we need to think more clearly about how we are to deliver Higher Education, to rethink teaching itself. This requires liberating ourselves from the assumption that it must include face-to- face contact. But in South Africa our interpretation of the distinction between distance and contact provision, as well as competition between universities, inhibits our understanding of possible future models. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za vii FOREWORD Morrow’s exploration of the transformation of Higher Education in South Africa – the social forces driving it, and the demands and conceptual limits of change in education – demonstrates the profoundly practical nature of philosophical treatment at its best. By focusing on key concepts like transformation, democracy, stakeholders, character and open learning, Morrow probes the theoretical foundations and dogmas that either bound or could enable the liberation that the passing of Apartheid promised. His analysis deploys among its tools careful treatment of essential distinctions: between warrant and acceptability (Essays 1, 2, 3, 6 and 7), discussion and conversation (Essays 1 and 5), knowledge, propaganda and power (Essays 2 and 5), rejection and refutation (Essays 7 and 8), rights and privileges (Essays 5 and 6), academic work and ideology (Essays 5 and 7), Higher Education and Further Education (Essay 8) and contact and distance education (Essays 4 and 9). There are, Morrow shows, no comfortable certainties, except perhaps the inevitability of shallow thinking. This leading commentator on South African education has again illustrated the urgent need for systematic philosophical inquiry into educational questions, especially teaching. His probing examination of the presuppositions that underpin our educational discourse exemplifies the very academic practice that this collection so resolutely defends. Penny Enslin Glasgow October 2008 Notes 1 His previous collections are Chains of Thought (1989) and Learning to Teach in South Africa (2007). 2 Co-presence refers to teaching situations in which the teacher and learners are present in the same place and at the same time. 3 During a visit to the Political Science Department at the University of Cape Town in 1986 the Irish politician, writer and academic, Conor Cruise O’Brien, criticised the academic boycott. The student protests that followed led the university to suspend his lectures and he was asked to leave. There followed intense debate about the nature and place of academic freedom. Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za viii Abbreviations ACU Association of Commonwealth Universities BSc Bachelor of Science CHE Council on Higher Education DoE Department of Education ICT Information and communication technology NCHE National Commission on Higher Education NEPI National Education Policy Investigation NOLA National Open Learning Agency NPHE National Plan for Higher Education NQF National Qualifications Framework ODL Open/Distance Learning RDP Reconstruction and Development Programme SAIDE South African Institute for Distance Education SAUVCA South African Universities Vice Chancellors’ Association SRC Students’ Representative Council UCT University of Cape Town Unisa University of South Africa Wits University of the Witwatersrand Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za 1 Cultivating humanity in the contemporary world (First presented at the Department of Education conference: ‘Values, Education and Democracy in the 21st Century’, Kirstenbosch, 22–24 February 2001) 1 … while we live, while we are among human beings, let us cultivate our humanity. 2 Background to the ‘Values, Education and Democracy in the 21st Century’ debate A good reason to launch the public debate ‘Values, Education and Democracy in the 21st Century’ at this time in our national history is the pervasive sense of an as yet unfulfilled hope that the transition in South Africa would lead to the growth of a new patriotism. This hope has as one of its sources the struggle against despotism in South Africa and the civic–republican conception of democracy embedded in the Freedom Charter. It was also vividly expressed in the extraordinarily sweeping shared optimism that characterised the first general election on 27 April 1994. But now, nearly seven years down the path, we find ourselves in a society drifting towards greed and competitive individualism, where market forces seem to override all other social ties, a society incrementally characterised by the selfish pursuit of individual or sectional interests and worrying signs of the perpetuation of the historical divisions which we hoped would have been overcome in a democratic society. In spite of gargantuan efforts to transform what is a key public institution in any democracy, education, and in spite of the generation of educational policies which are internationally admired, many of our educational institutions remain in the doldrums, with deep demoralisation among teachers, and pupils and students who seem to be motivated more by a sense of entitlement than by a commitment to the ideals of education. 1 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za 2 BOUNDS OF DEMOCRACY In the light of these disappointments the Values in Education Initiative is particularly welcome. This initiative is an attempt to foster a public debate about our shared values – values that should bind us together as a particular historical community and shape our individual and collective identities. Values with this kind of potency are not founded by coercion or legislative fiat; they emerge gradually, if at all, out of community life. But ongoing discussion amongst morally responsible agents, who share a sense of a common history and a common fate in an uncompromisingly competitive globalising world, can serve as a catalyst. The current conference is one moment in that discussion and, arrogantly assuming that I am a ‘morally responsible agent’, this essay is conceived as a contribution to that discussion. It begins by drawing attention to two significant features of the definition of values that we find in the Report of the Working Group on Values in Education. 3 It then picks up on some attractive thoughts from Gandhi about the relation between education and character-building and claims that – appealing as these ways of talking might be – they do not enable us to confront the main enemy, which in this essay I shall call instrumental rationality. The essay concludes with a few comments about teacher education in relation to competences and commitments, and discussion and epistemic values. Character-building The Report states that, ‘By values we mean desirable qualities of character such as honesty, integrity, tolerance, diligence, responsibility, compassion, altruism, justice and respect.’ 4 There can be little dispute that honesty, integrity and so on are ‘desirable qualities of character’ and that they are qualities which we should try to foster in our schools and other institutions. But what I want to draw attention to here is the eccentric idea that ‘values’ are ‘qualities of character’. It is clear that this is an exceedingly limited definition of ‘values’, one that leaves no logical space for most of the significant uses we have for this word. How, for example, could we in these terms explain our thinking of the value of, say, education itself, or mathematics or music, or the value of shelter, food and drinking water to those mired in spirals of poverty. It cannot help to say that this definition is offered only for the purposes of this Report. The Report is a public document that is supposed to launch a public debate about values, education and democracy, Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za [...]... systems of governance that effectively sideline professional expertise This is merely one instance of the ways in which, across the realm of education, from the development of the new curriculum to the South African Schools Act (No 84 of 1996), professional teachers and academics are treated, at best, as equal stakeholders amongst a range of others It is clear that these are symptoms of the prioritising of. .. a specialised form of conversation, should serve as the centre of gravity in our thinking about values, education and democracy in a globalising world in which we would like to give impetus to the emergence of a new patriotism The practice of discussion is strongly opposed to instrumental rationality and its theory of values Discussion shares some of the features and conditions of conversation Conversation... values of communities of inquiry, and are misunderstood if interpreted as merely subjective or relativist In practice, different fields of inquiry and different communities of inquirers embody epistemic values somewhat differently (the disciplines of history are different from the disciplines of physics), but any field of inquiry, by definition, is constituted by epistemic values The ideals of education... epistemic values, and this must be a key dimension of any debate about values and education Of course, we must acknowledge that education also has important contingent effects such as the empowerment of learners, the amelioration of social and political problems (e.g the spread of HIV/AIDS), or the fostering of a new patriotism, but we lose a sense of the value of education or inquiry if we confuse their... Although there are other possible cases, the most familiar example of the simplifying manoeuvre of ranking principles in advance of a consideration of the details of actual situations is that of privileging equality over freedom or vice versa What is distinctive of the ranking manoeuvre is that it acknowledges the separate significance of the conflicting principles This manoeuvre simplifies our moral... evaluations of the desirability of the ends The value of the means is derivative from that, and can be assessed according to how effectively the means achieve the end The next step is, then, fairly obvious We assess the value of the ends or the consequences themselves in terms of the extent to which they satisfy the desires of human beings But the desires of human beings are essentially the desires of individual... development and acquisition of knowledge Central to a civic–republican conception of democracy is the principle that disagreements and conflicts in the society will be solved by discussion rather than by dogma, violence, propaganda or other forms of manipulation or sheer power Education for citizenship in such a democracy must have as one of its primary aims the development of the capacities, including... outcome of a kind of discussion called inquiry This kind of discussion includes not only contemporary or local participants and is characterised by specialised forms of discipline shaped by the definitive goal of finding the truth about some matter This is why the distinction between warrant (or evidence) and acceptability (or mere agreement) is so central to the disciplines of inquiry Like other forms of. .. ideas persist there is no hope of our ever knowing the true value of education.13 Instrumental rationality is a tightly knit web of beliefs, conceptions and practices and there can, of course, be various ways of characterising it One way would be to show, as Gandhi does above, the ways in which instrumental rationality is the guiding philosophy of markets, and that one of its symptoms is rampant consumerism... does not mean knowledge of letters but it means character-building’.7 He says, in 1917, that ‘all education must aim at building character’,8 in 1924 that ‘the formation of character would have priority over knowledge of the alphabet’,9 and in 1933 that ‘the primary aim of all education is, or should be, the moulding of the character of pupils’.10 The confidence and lucidity of these sentiments probably . central aim BOUNDS OF DEMOCRACY Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za 5 of education might be a way of countering the drift away from the hoped-for new patriotism. Part of the appeal of this idea. motivated more by a sense of entitlement than by a commitment to the ideals of education. 1 Free download from www.hsrcpress.ac.za 2 BOUNDS OF DEMOCRACY In the light of these disappointments. dimensions of our problem get swallowed into the dominant social ontology in which society is conceived of as nothing more than a collection of individuals driven by instrumental values. BOUNDS OF DEMOCRACY Free