Educator ahead of his time leaves a potent legacy
Clive Millar, educator, teacher educator and educator of adults, died at his home in Scarborough in Cape Town on July 18. It ended a long battle with cancer.
He was born in Cape Town and attended the South African College School and, after what he described as a poor matriculation pass, he entered the University of Cape Town (UCT). There he blossomed both intellectually and personally, achieving a first-class honours degree in English in 1957, a bachelor of education degree with distinction a year later, and a master of arts in English in 1962.
From 1959 to 1963, Millar taught at Westerford High School in Rondebosch, Cape Town, and the Gordon Schools in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He joined the staff of the Aberdeen College of Education in 1963 and remained there until his appointment at UCT in 1967. In 1972 he successfully completed a master of science degree in education at the University of Stirling in Scotland.
In 1975, he took up the inaugural chair of teaching science at the University of Fort Hare. He remained there until he was appointed professor of adult education at UCT in 1979, the first such chair at a South African university. He held this position until his early retirement because of ill health at the end of 1998.
As a teacher, Millar was noted for his openness, modesty, warmth and humanity, and provided his students with space to explore different options and directions, to the point where those with whom he was working would come to the realisation of what could be appropriate in any given situation. It was a subtle, rare and deeply respectful gift.
As a researcher and writer, he possessed an acuity few of his colleagues matched. As family friend Professor Barry Hymer has written: “Clive’s work reflected a profound respect for the reader and a finely tuned capacity for problematising easily accepted norms or understandings. His writing style was impressively accurate and succinct, while his logic and written work was admirably spare, elegant and unpretentiously lucid.”
The well-crafted and prophetic arguments of his University of Fort Hare inaugural lecture in 1975 resonate to this day as the government and South African universities attempt to address the meltdown in these institutions.
The boldness of what Millar had to say on that occasion and his subsequent oratory in the decision-making halls of UCT, although generally courteously received, marked him as a person to be taken seriously, if not to be kept at arm’s length by those threatened by his insights.
He had the ability to expose the contradictions implicit in teacher and higher education, contradictions that persist to this day. He saw teaching as a kind of communication with learners and students, and recognised the power of the context to demotivate and disempower both teachers and learners. A clear thread is notable in his personal development too, from a belief and confidence in technical skills to the evolution of an acute personal and experiential awareness of personal knowledge and a sound awareness of the significance of context.
His role in shaping the future of university-based adult education was profound. His move to UCT as its first professor of adult education gave him the opportunity to develop and nurture a model of a collective institutional academic enterprise, which his close friend and colleague Professor Tony Morphet has described as bringing together people and ideas in which the intrinsic goods of intellectual work are corporately and intensely valued.
As Morphet has remarked: “Clive was a craftsman — boats, houses, kombis and second-hand cars, all the ordinary things anyone gets involved in, conjoined with intellectual craftsmanship — the use of propositions, logic, argument, debate and reason.”
It was a model that brought together marginal people and immersed them in processes that encouraged them to find a common focus in a coherent project.
On the national stage, Millar is probably best remembered as one of the founding fathers of the Kenton Conference — an annual get-together of teacher education leaders, which did much to inform and influence the shape of teacher and adult education policy, practice and research in post-apartheid South Africa.
He wrote several books and seminal papers that, when read today, surprise the reader with what they say about the present challenges facing education in South Africa and in many other countries too. Last year, in spite of declining health, he published A Practical Guide to Classroom Research, which brings together the best in classroom-based research by teachers and their training.
Millar is survived by his wife, Sheila, and two sons, Christopher and Paul, their wives and five grandchildren.