Issued by the Department of Education
Port Elizabeth 3 March 2000
I am pleased to be with you as you celebrate another milestone in the life of your technikon and the evolution of higher education in our country.
Yesterday is ancient history. Today is the past. Tomorrow is vanishing. That about sums up the supersonic speed of change as we enter the twenty-first century.
In the famous words of King Arthur and his knights: The old order changeth, yielding place to new.
Aptly dubbed the century of technology, the 21st century ushers in a world radically miniaturized by computers, e-mail and the internet. It has given a competitive edge to those individuals and institutions who have harnessed information technology in the service of their fields of operation.
South African higher education institutions are no exception. The challenge they face is to adapt to new knowledge and content paradigms as well as new modes of interaction and delivery. This has been occasioned by changes in the geography of higher education, where the comfort of separate pedagogy has been replaced by the challenges of dynamic interaction among people for long artificially kept apart. Access, both in terms of numbers and success rates, has become one of the central challenges as we reconfigure the landscape of higher education.
With regard to that specific challenge, we have seen different institutions reacting in different ways, with a few in fact even acting proactively rather than reactively. It is in the latter category that I place this institution. I say this against the background of the Multimedia Teaching and Learning Centre (MTLC) that we are officially opening today. It is a proactive move to depart from the character of an institution that is primarily a teaching one to an institution that facilitates and promotes self-learning on the part of its students.
We have seen teledelivery of programmes by some of our higher education institutions - a form of distance educational delivery via the e-mail and the internet. The MTLC initiative, on the other hand, exploits all aspects of information technology maximally for both the contact and distance education staff and students. In this context a library is defined in terms not only of the books it carries in the traditional format but also in terms of the electronic stock it has in the form of the worldwide web.
Video conferencing removes the barrier of distance between lecturer and student and between the institution and the teaching and research expertise outside it. The Manufacturing Technology Research Centre is at the cutting edge of research into high-tech manufacturing possibilities. Through the Video Broadcast System personal computers are used to download learning material with which students can interact without direct connection with the lecturer.
I have seen the future. It is here already.
What, however, is technology without the human element? Without the men and women who constitute the teaching and learning cadre of this institution all of this multimillion rand star wars technology would amount to nought. The real challenge, from that perspective, is about to begin. Establishing the physical infrastructure of the Centre was the easier part. The critical challenge is to ensure that the Centre achieves the goals that underpin its foundation and justify its existence. I believe those to be the effective use of technology to make quality education accessible to as many South Africans as pedagogically possible. I must reiterate the fact that I use accessible not only in the sense of admissions but also of a successful conclusion of a chosen course of study within the prescribed period. Information at my disposal suggests that over the past five years access to higher education, in terms of greater admissions, has been a success, but in terms of the throughput rates it has been rather disappointing.
I am told that to ensure greater success the staff members of the Technikon’s Bureau for Educational Support – which is also housed in this Centre – are constantly developing and exploring teaching and learning options to find innovative solutions for the teaching and learning challenges which exist today. The Technikon’s educational processes are geared towards ensuring that active learning, problem-solving and the application of acquired skills take place.
Hopefully, lessons learned from this initiative will find their way to other institutions not only in the Eastern Cape but also nationally. Even better than mere lessons, in fact, direct benefit by other institutions, particularly in close proximity to the Technikon, would be good for the higher education system in general. You are no doubt aware of the size and shape exercise I have commissioned the Council on Higher Education (CHE) to advise me on. By the end of June I shall be having the CHE’s proposals on the reconfiguration of the higher education landscape. It is against the background of the expected mergers or closer institutional collaboration that I also welcome this initiative. Whatever the outcome of the size and shape restructuring exercise relative to this institution, the higher education system as a whole stands to benefit from the MTLC initiative.
In his famous poem, "Journey of the Magi", TS Eliot imagines the magi returning to their hometowns after their visit to the newly-born Jesus Christ. He imagines them, after their epiphanic experience, feeling dislocated in their old lives. One of them expresses this in unforgettable terms:
IWe returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I see, through the MTLC initiative, a future where South African institutions will look back at the end of the twentieth century as the old dispensation. I would be happy if, as we talk, our higher education institutions were saying they are no longer at ease in our current dispensation. I would be excited if they stopped, right now, clutching the education gods of the past and embraced the radical changes the new century demands from all of us.
Let me caution - despite my unequivocal embrace of the initiative which has brought us here - against us becoming slaves of the technology we are using. Education, as Gilbert Highet posits in his seminal book, The Art of Teaching, is a humanising practice and experience. That element should still be the driving force of our interaction as lecturers and students, be it face to face or through the magic of the technology at our disposal. We should all know the danger of technology turning its users into automatons and its users’ clients into mere numbers.
Given where South Africa comes from, with people practically turned into objects, it is crucially important that we do not allow technology to make us inadvertently repeat that gross disregard for the right of our people to their humanity.
With the virtual classroom being inherently impersonal, the Technikon staff has its work cut out ensuring that they still see their students as human beings with feelings and prejudices, rational and irrational.
You are aware of Tirisano, the vehicle through which I, as Minister of Education, will be delivering a functional education system geared to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. I see the establishment of the MTLC as an advancement of that central goal of Tirisano. Functionality within the higher education system must also be defined in terms of quality, not just stability. The quality of the academic output from this Technikon promises to be excellent, if this initiative delivers as per the potential we see.
May I conclude by extending a congratulatory message to the Council, management, staff and students of this Technikon on this visionary move. I am sure that the whole higher education sector wishes you well in your endeavour as, ultimately, your success is the system’s success, your failure the system’s failure.
My view of the regeneration of education in this country is best captured in the last stanza of the poem, "The Old Ships", by James Elroy Flecker. It reads:
It was so old a ship – who knows, who knows?
And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain
To see the mast burst open with a rose,
And the whole deck put on its leaves again.
Our system is like that ship - old, yet beautiful. Our challenge is to let its mast burst open with a rose and the whole deck put on its leaves again.
I thank you all.