Comments On The Tertiary Education Green Paper

South Africa’s Minister of Higher Education and Training Blade Nzimande, in an article following his attendance at a universities conference in Havana, raised some very important issues for this country’s higher education debate – which, as he suggests, is completely moribund, from bottom to top.

The great irony is that he had to go to a country that has not had an election in 50 years to be stimulated. In the Umsebenzi article, the minster’s main issues seem to be around the knowledge economy, neo-liberalism, internationalisation, sustainability and the country’s new universities.

The knowledge economy question

The minister and one of his bag carriers (ideologically and materially) have often raised the ‘knowledge economy’ question. I think one can look at it in two ways.

The first is about whose knowledge and for what, which is a very political question that we debated often during the period of the National Education Coordinating Committee, NECC [an action group formed during the height of apartheid in the 1980s to wage the struggle for ‘people’s education’ and develop alternative education policies].

This is, of course, a very important issue, which is at the heart of redistribution. But my disillusionment with it was that those who endlessly engaged in this debate seldom produced any useful new knowledge themselves.

Second, and in contrast, at the Centre for Higher Education Transformation, CHET, the knowledge economy is used in the empirical sense: knowledge is now a more important component than capital or labour in production.

At the 2012 World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab, the CEO of Davos, said that ‘capitalism’ is an outdated term; it developed when capital was the most important component of production. He said that it is now knowledge and talent that are key – and suggested the term ‘talentism’.

The information technology revolution is informative. Both the rich and the poor need it – the former to become richer and the latter to escape poverty, according to renowned sociologist Manuel Castells.

What capitalism does, even in an African National Congress-Communist Party neo-liberal alliance, is to skew the usefulness of IT towards the rich. So the issue is not the knowledge, but who controls it (the old means of production issue) – after all, it is produced and used by both rich and poor.

CHET uses knowledge economy as code to promote mass participation in higher education, skills and innovation.

This is counter to the notion perpetuated by many communist regimes – Russia being the prime example – that wealth is not in the ‘head’, but rather under the ground. Minerals must be mined with low knowledge and cheap labour, and then transported across great distances for infrastructure projects that have vast payoff opportunities.

(Previously Africa shipped metals and minerals to the West and called it colonialism; now most of it goes to the ‘neo-communist’ East. Perhaps our children will call this anti-knowledge, or simple stupidity.)

But very important for South Africa’s draft Green Paper for Post-school Education and Training is that China has completely embraced the knowledge economy.

China has had the fastest growth in higher education enrolment in the history of humankind, and a growth of over 40% in PhD production in the past five years. By contrast, South African higher education student growth has stagnated at a 17% participation rate for the past five years, and PhD production has grown by a meagre 5%.

Read details here.