Work-integrated learning was highlighted recently at the annual international conference of the South African Society for Cooperative Education, held in Durban on May 22. This kind of learning characterises the curricula at universities of technology and prepares students in higher education for the working world.
It is important to understand the significance of this work-integrated learning at universities of technology given that many think that higher education is out of touch with the expectations of business and the requirements of the world of work. There is a widely held perception that higher education does not produce graduates who have relevant skills.
Graduates are produced with different sets of skills within a diversified and differentiated higher education system. It is imperative to maintain this division of labour to assure a system that is responsive to both global and local needs. Our institutions cannot aim for the same functional status.
The origins of a university lie in the fact that knowledge is an article of great intrinsic value to society as it is essential to satisfy human curiosity and needs. There is, therefore, a spectrum of different kinds of knowledge, addressing everything from idle curiosity to needs. These include knowledge for its own sake, esoteric and arcane practices limited to a few individuals, and knowledge possessed by a critical number of people directly to promote development imperatives.
This means that the notion of skills is influenced by various practices associated with knowledge. Again there is a wide spectrum, roughly as follows: magic, mythology, religious beliefs, theology, philosophy and science. Only the latter three practices have so far in our history lent themselves to a systematisation of what may be called fundamental truths and eternal beliefs that can be practised within a university setting. These truths and beliefs are what is accessible to us through the scholarship of specialist knowledge through academic disciplines. Let me call this form of knowledge ”higher learning”, to focus the discussion.
I propose that the primary purpose of a university is the keeping of this ”higher learning”. The essential skills to be acquired for this purpose are the mastery of disciplinary canons, the codification of knowledge and its dissemination. It is at this level, where the role of higher education is primarily viewed as the generator of new knowledge and ideas, that the discourse on ”skill” in higher education encounters serious challenges.
Is this kind of ”higher learning”, associated with the furtherance and conservation of the intellectual exercise, the sole mandate of the university? The imperatives of national development have resulted in the submergence of the university in such enterprises as professional training — broadly speaking, producing graduates for the professions — and the imparting of vocational skills that directly address the needs of the economy. As a result the modern university is characterised by a commitment to research, professional training and the provision of vocational education and training.
At other times special institutional types have been created in some countries to specifically address practical education for vocational purposes: the Morrill ”land grant” universities in the United States, the polytechnics in the United Kingdom and the technikons in South Africa were such institutions.
The challenge for today’s South African universities is to balance the ”higher learning” mission against the imperative for them to act as engines of national development and economic growth. Which and how much of these extraneous activities individual universities take upon themselves is a matter of vision and mission within a diverse national landscape.
The continuum of missions of higher education today is along an axis between the poles of ”higher learning” and ”vocational education”. The focus of the latter is largely practical, while the former is not. Today’s spectrum of higher education institutional types is correspondingly wide, from research universities to vocational institutions. In this spectrum institutions try to strike a balance between competing imperatives, aims and challenges: theoretical, scholarly and broadly generalisable knowledge against practical, vocational and immediately useful knowledge; students with rigorous secondary-school preparation against those with low and less-than-academic secondary-school preparation; and images of high prestige and status against less impressive images.
Where should the emphasis be for South Africa as a developing country faced with unique challenges? Larger and more serious attention should be given to technical and vocational learning. The more serious responsibility in higher education for meeting the challenges facing our country belongs to this sector. The furtherance of ”civilised” and meaningful life is a larger and more serious interest at this juncture of our development than the pursuit of knowledge for its own idle sake.
A differentiated system will ensure that the traditional university dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in scholarship is not charged with extraneous duties that are themselves so significant to require special attention. Creating the illusion that these two systems of knowledge — pure scholarship on the one hand and technical and vocational knowÂledge on the other — are parallel variants of a single line exacerbates vocational drift in the former and academic drift in the latter and is not in the interest of national development. Hence the need for a strong grounding of institutional choice on the degree to which the curriculum focus is on the attainment of workplace skills.
Are there any benefits likely to accrue from the recent creation of ”comprehensive” universities? There is an expectation that these two systems with such divergent purposes and animus will coexist harmoniously within the same corporate establishment. It is not clear whether this arrangement will have a positive or a negative impact on academic policy and on the frame of mind of the academic personnel.
Will one culture ultimately prevail and dominate the other? And with what consequences? If, for example, the ”university” animus ultimately prevails, will the technological staff be placed in a false position of having to invest their technological work with veneers of sophistication and scholarship to gain the same status as their academic counterparts who enjoy scientific and scholarly prestige, thereby unwittingly breeding a generation of academic interlopers?
I suggest that within the South African context the provision of the more technically and vocationally oriented forms of higher education is largely the job of universities of technology. The predominant aim of this form of education is to produce graduates that are most ready to enter the workplace. This preparation for work-readiness needs to be done systematically to equip students for the world of work. The integration of work experience in curriculum and learning programmes to achieve work-integrated learning is the most effective way of realising this goal. This requires the building and maintenance of strong relationships between higher education institutions on the one hand and business and industry on the other.
Among other things, we need to:
- ensure that we have strong, viable universities of technology that deliver an indispensable kind of education and training that is necessarily of a different kind from that produced by more traditional universities;
- protect and strengthen the technological and vocational component of the comprehensive universities so that it does not become lost in time because of academic drift and Âacademic-culture dynamics; and
- promote and strengthen work-integrated learning in higher education both through robust policy and planning and through critical, strong partnerships with business and industry.
Duma Malaza is chief executive of Higher Education South Africa. He writes here in his personal capacity