The Big Read: Racists need to be taught a lesson, but many varsities don’t do their job

The one thing that Matthew Theunissen and Ntokozo Qwabe have in common is degrees from top universities.

The other thing they share, of course, is their racial hatred.

Theunissen unloaded his vile racism on black South Africans through a Facebook posting decrying the decision by the Minister of Sport to withhold international sporting competitions from coming here until the codes sort out their transformation problems.

Qwabe unleashed his venom on a struggling white waitress in an Observatory café, first refusing to tip her until “you give back the land” and then boasting on Facebook how he had humiliated the young woman by reducing her to “typical white tears”. The waitress was working tables to pay for her mother’s cancer treatments .

Theunissen has two Masters degrees, one each from Stellenbosch and Utrecht. Qwabe obtained qualifications from South Africa and now reads for a degree at Oxford.

Right there collapses the argument that travel broadens the mind.

Their European studies did nothing to deal with racial hatred. Theunissen studied in one of the most liberal nations in the world, the Netherlands, and Qwabe at a top-ranked global university. None of this mattered in shaping their bitter views of human beings who do not share their race.

Theunissen boasts on his LinkedIn profile that he works well with diverse people, while Qwabe ties himself in all kinds of moral knots trying to justify living off a bequest from the imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, whose statue the visiting South African wants removed from the grounds of the University of Oxford.

I have enduring respect for my parents and grandparents, and millions of South Africans like them. They did not finish high school but they had infinitely more education than these two university-trained students. Why? While training imparts skills, education instils values.

No doubt Theunissen and Qwabe have or will acquire competence in environmental management and civil law, respectively. But what they do not have is a sense of humanity, a modicum of respect, or a measure of restraint in dealing with people they perceive to be different from them. Education, in other wo r d s .

While training happens inside specialised institutions, education is not restricted to what transpires inside schools or universities. Education is what happened when my mother klapped me as a child for not greeting a complete stranger as “uncle”. No, I do not condone the smacking of children but I never again walked past another adult, regardless of colour, class or levels of sobriety, without greeting them as “uncle” or “auntie” so-and-so.

Education is the ability to distinguish race and class, a wealthy imperialist from a working-class waitress.

An educated person would know the difference between a sports minister’s pronouncement in an election year that promises to ban international sporting events at home because of a lack of transformation, and the reality that millions of young black South Africans are still denied access to basic sporting facilities and paid coaches in every code from rugby to hockey to athletics.

Consumed by their racial bitterness, Theunissen and Qwabe collapse any complex distinctions into a singular target for retaliation. Which raises the question, what on earth do we do inside places called educational institutions if not impart knowledge, skills and values?

Truth is, our schools have become testing machines with a narrow focus on improving results whether for the ANA tests in the lower grades or the NSC examination in Grade 12. Universities are consumed by capture (new students), coverage and completion rates for in this way we maximise subsidy income from the state in times of great financial uncertainty.

This new managerialism in universities, across the world, have eclipsed attention to questions of what is worth teaching and learning in the first place.

So, for example, while universities everywhere profess commitment to the three tasks of teaching, research and community service, the fact is that institutions pay lip service to public duty; show me one university that promotes an academic based on their commitment to community work.

The money comes from teaching as many students as you possibly can (hence the overcrowded classrooms) and generating as many units of publication as possible (hence the many undercooked articles in low-level South African journals).

Theunissen and Qwabe are merely products of a weakened educational system; both will find excuses for their behaviour even if one or both come to mumble an apology.

To spend too much time on the rant of two individuals on social media is to distract us from the more serious post-apartheid question of what is education really for?