LETTERS

Universities are colonial by nature, but is it all that bad?

KEN BENNING’S letter (“Be proud of our brave and resolute students”, The Star, September 27) refers. I support his plea to raise the standard of the debate about university education.

He, like many others, seem to support the end of colonialist education. Unfortunately, what this means is rarely explained.

I would think that universities are colonial in nature. This being the case, the end of colonial education suggests two possibilities: either universities should be shut down entirely or maybe colonialism was not all bad.

Benning makes a case for the use of indigenous languages in education. While there is a place for that, it might be questioned to what extent this should be required.

For it to be effective, requires text books and with a relatively limited demand, it will be difficult to persuade lecturers and publishers to produce them in the various languages.

In addition, if students want to excel in many of their fields, they need to have access to a wide range of textbooks and research, which are often in English, so proficiency in English is needed.

If we want our students to be able to contribute globally, the inability to discuss issues in a common language would be a hindrance. It seems logical that while students might not initially be confident using English, they’ll need it increasingly.

In addition, Benning makes a distinction between peaceful protest and those with anarchistic tendencies. The problem is that this distinction ignores democracy.

It doesn’t seem that many of the leaders of the protests are members of student representative councils. These protest leaders therefore seem to bypass democratic structures.

A friend of mine who is a lecturer told me of an incident last year where they reached an agreement with some students on some issues, only for another group to arrive a few days later with their list of issues saying the previous group were to be ignored. If democracy is important in this country, we need our future leaders to demonstrate their support for this.

The debate about university education needs to be broadened from what students want to raise to issues they seemingly don’t want to address. This includes the large numbers of students who fail to graduate.

If there was, say, an entrance exam, other than passing matric, it might mean the existing money can be used more effectively by being spread among a smaller group of students with a higher chance of graduating and thus having a higher amount available for each student.

Other potential solutions don’t seem to get much publicity, possibly because the focus seems to be on students’ rights and not on their obligations. What about students studying at a university with lower fees?

If students stayed at home and studied through Unisa it might be less expensive than staying in accommodation at some of the top universities.

I have a friend working in the Far East whose son in presently studying in the US and who works on his campus in part payment for his fees.

Instead of students calling for an end to outsourcing as they did last year, shouldn’t they have volunteered to take over some of the functions and thereby reduce their fees?

It is possible that students will only learn later in life that a focus just on their issues is not a long-term solution to a wide range of societal issues and that a better approach is to learn a give-and-take approach? But my concern is to what extent students are being engaged on this basis. Douglasdale, Joburg