JONATHAN JANSEN | Youth are trained, not educated — there’s a difference, and this is what can be done

I have come to the sad conclusion that it might not be a good idea to send your child to a South African university in its present form.

That’s because of an antiquated curriculum in which students are trained rather than educated. From day 1 you are trained to become an urban planner or an optometrist or a teacher with the narrow skills required for the job. For most of those three, four or five years, you are taught to design urban spaces or detect glaucoma in the eye or teach neurodiverse learners. All good, except that is training, not education. 

At least our apartheid masters were more honest — they named the department governing black schools as “education and training” and everyone else fell under “education and culture”, the infuriating distinction being that blacks need training and the rest needed culture.

In reality, all our children were indoctrinated by apartheid schooling with an ideological commitment to the training of the black learners. 

We have never really risen above the training mandate of the curriculum; even the department of higher education & training, as it is now called, gives a wink at apartheid logics — train them. It is one of the most dangerous legacies of our past.

When will we wake up? The current curriculum is like teaching typewriting in the age of supercomputers

Here’s the reality of the university experience of students in 21st century South Africa.

You can go through all those years of training never having learnt about the future of money and how new digital currencies will transform not only the economy but your personal life as well.

You can sit through a training degree in history or architecture and not once grapple with the origins of deadly viruses or the effects of climate change on urban dwellings.

You can walk off the graduation stage with that beautifully bound certificate in nursing or engineering and missed an entire education on the transformative impacts of artificial intelligence on the modern workplace. In other words, you would have been narrowly trained rather than broadly educated.

When will we wake up? The current curriculum is like teaching typewriting in the age of supercomputers.

I have tried hard over the past 15 years to convince universities that our students are graduating as social misfits, thereby limiting their range of vision as citizens as well as their employment opportunities in a changing workplace. They are machines trained for a job that might not exist in that form by the time they graduate.

Universities respond like any self-conserving organisation when confronted with these realities. They turn inward with arguments that are, quite frankly, laughable. There is not enough time in the curriculum (this is nonsense; a curriculum is a human construction that can and is often changed by the imagination of a few or the compliance regulations of professional bodies).

The real fear of these academics is that they are scared and insecure. Having built their expertise and reputations on a limited frame of knowledge, changing the curriculum in the face of AI, for example, threatens to unsettle comfortable careers. So they fall back on what they have been doing for decades, rather than retool themselves for the many-faced crises that threatened to eliminate human beings from the planet.

There is a new word around called polycrises, that is the simultaneous occurrence of several catastrophic events such as climate change, the energy crisis and popular revolt. Any South African who has been watching the steady implosion of our wealthiest city and still believes we are preparing graduates appropriately for these multiple crises, is clearly not paying attention.

What is to be done? I have reached out to a few friends, known for their capacity for imagination and innovation in the education space.

We are thinking of building an independent university (not a private, for-profit venture) with a single degree, the BA. It will be interdisciplinary and organised entirely around the challenges of our time. Students will be involved in the shaping of the curriculum since it is their lives and those of their children that will be most affected by the coming crises. They will do internships in the major research and development centres of the world studying everything from global warming to machine learning.

In this interdisciplinary curriculum, the students will engage the big questions about the human condition (why am I here?) and the kind of activism that can transform human lives (burning buildings is so yesterday). 

Of course, students will learn to read and write and analyse and compute but all geared towards a higher purpose (the world around us) connected to an inner purpose (a meaningful life).

In other words, our graduates will gain the kind of education as a foundation on which they acquire the human and technical competences with which to understand the world — and change it.