ISMAIL LAGARDIEN: More money will not fix higher learning

There’s a response I once gave someone who, for most of the past 35 years or so, had asked me for a loan or a financial bail-out more often than I can recall.

I have written off most of those loans as part of what is colloquially known as a "black tax". This "tax" is one of the obligations you have when you are one of the few people in an extended family who has had the privilege of a regular income over an extended period of time.

Anyway, one response I once gave when I had to bail out this person for the nth time was quite blunt: "A lack of money is not what got you into trouble. Money won’t get you out of trouble."

It was harsh, I know, but I also knew that this person had made several bad decisions and that he had some very bad habits, the least of which was an addiction to gambling.

One should not be too sanctimonious about bad decision making. What I will say, though, is that the inceptive purpose of education starts with learning to speak, read, write and understand.

Recall the thrill when a parent hears their infant’s first words, or when a child counts to 10 for the first time. You cannot put a price on that. And when the child graduates from university or a technical college, and enters the world independently and confidently, parents know their sacrifices have not been in vain.

The reality in SA today is sobering. One of the finest voices in higher learning, Prof Nomalanga Mkhize of Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, last week laid bare one of the biggest problems

in education: "Within SA higher education is a deep conspiracy of silence, our dirty little

secret — that we are churning out, by the thousands, students who cannot even string sentences together, most of whom plagiarise extensively through undergraduate

courses to land up on the graduation stage ….

"In terms of teaching and learning, the majority have become not much differentiable from rote learning colleges where students are not expected to master advanced level reading, critique and writing in order to earn their degree," Mkhize said.

Students will try to get away with doing as little as possible – and expect to pass. One argument I always heard is this: how can I fail that class when I attended all the lectures? This is a problem that more money cannot solve.

So, at first take, President Jacob Zuma’s pledge of "fully subsidised free higher education and training for poor and working-class South African undergraduates" seems like a good thing.

However, it has to be seen in terms of his political ambitions and expectations. My sense is that his pledge will not be met in the new year. Worse still, I suspect that it may cause a lot more problems than solutions.

The problems in SA’s education start early in the system, and are reproduced by teachers, administrators, unions — from elementary school to higher learning

Zuma’s pledge is at best a palliative — in that it ignores many of the structural problems in education. These are problems that more money cannot resolve.

For one, you cannot turn around a teacher who makes more money from running a school’s tuck shop or minibus shuttle than from standing in front of a class and opening enquiring minds or unleashing the creative imagination of young people.

In his haste to score political points, Zuma neglected a crucial dimension of the #FeesMustFall movement; the appeal for quality education. This, I believe, is at least as important as tuition-free education for the poor.

Even if the Treasury were to find an extra R12bn – while keeping the money supply constant, chances are that the money will be wasted if quality is not guaranteed. It’s a cruel thing to say, but given our literacy rates, the next generation of university students could be worse than the current crop.

The problems in SA’s education start early in the system, and are reproduced by teachers, administrators, unions — from elementary school to higher learning. One should, of course, not generalise. There are very many dedicated people in education. There are also some unpleasant characters who are given to self-dramatisation and apostasy; from cash-for-jobs hucksters at schools to university professors who peddle intellectual snake-oil.

We can agree then, that education needs funding, as much as required to ensure it is tuition-free for the poor and affordable for everyone else.

There is, however, a diabolical belief that more funding will necessarily result in reading and writing skills, in the ability to untangle complex issues, and then weave them together into new concepts and practices coherently.

Money is not what got us into trouble, more money will not solve our problems in higher learning. There’s a lesson in political economy in there somewhere.

• Lagardien is former executive dean of business and economic sciences at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank and the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.