Universities must teach students what freedom is – a South African course is trying to do just that

A typical student wants a university degree as a ticket to a salary. For this young person, education is a journey towards “having”. And the way to complete the journey is mainly to remember, repeat or reproduce what the teacher says and does.

This having-orientation is understandable given the often precarious realities of life, particularly in the global south, including South Africa, where I am based as a university lecturer. It is understandable, yet it fosters apathy in the classroom, for the monetary aims of students are not typically aligned with the aims of learning.

In response to this situation, for a decade Rhodes University’s Allan Gray Centre for Leadership Ethics has been developing a course called IiNtetho zoBomi, which translates from isiXhosa, one of South Africa’s languages, as “conversations about life”.

IiNtetho zoBomi is a year-long course offered to all students at the university. Over 2,000 have completed it since its inception. It aims to bridge the gap between character education and vocational education. The course shows students how interrelated reading, writing, thinking and being are.

It’s an opportunity for students to think about what matters to them and how to live accordingly. We hope they learn to have a say in how their lives will go. We want them to understand how education will equip them for life – not just work – and promote self-mastery. Ideally, students will realise along the way that self-mastery comes from learning with others in communities of inquiry.

With my colleagues at the centre, I wrote about the course in a recent paper, explaining the thinking behind it and how it works. From initial reticence and outright suspicion, the course is starting to receive broad institutional support from academics and management. The idea has been mooted that it should become a common course for all first-year students.

The course has also received an endorsement from educational sociologist Kathy Luckett and feminist philosopher Ann Cahill. In their review of the course, they commented that it had developed “a unique and powerful form of pedagogy that is clearly speaking to students’ interests and existential needs, and effectively providing students with capacities that allow them to author their own thoughts and lives”.

Inquisitiveness versus apathy

If a salary is the overriding motive for pursuing higher education, it helps to explain why so many students seem to lack the inquisitiveness to seek knowledge, and hence are not in the correct frame of mind required for deep learning and the human growth that comes with the learning mindset.

This lack of inquisitiveness is also encouraged by the fact that the global university has primarily become a market service provider. The market wants and needs professionals, and universities provide them. This may not be a problem, unless the professional aspect of human life is separated, as it often is, from the central goal of education: to form well-adjusted, autonomous human beings.

This severance between learning for work and learning for life leaves human growth to chance. It fosters the passive absorption of whatever happens to be in the air of the times, instead of the formation of a capacity for critical thinking necessary for autonomy.

Contemporary universities presume that if one looks after people’s career concerns, life will look after itself, which is a grave mistake.

Conversations about life

The course includes student-led lectures, peer dialogues and weekly service learning at local no-fee paying public primary schools. The students also keep journals in which they reflect on their lives in relation to the course’s material.

We introduce students to ideas such as the existential psychologist Erich Fromm’s distinction between “being” and “having” orientations to education. In other words, a good education helps you to be a certain way, not just to have certain things.

Students also learn that “to take freedom for granted is to extinguish the possibility of attaining it”, as expressed in the documentary Creating Freedom: The Lottery of Birth. This is the idea that people are shaped by circumstances, and understanding how these circumstances shape them is a first step in attaining real freedom. We show this documentary to our students in addition to other movies and documentaries about the weekly topics discussed in class.

We encourage students to develop an inner dialogue and understand that they passively absorb much of what their thinking draws on. We challenge students to consider what they see, or fail to see, and how they see it. We invite students to reflect on how external forces like peer pressure and ideology act on them, as do internal forces like the confirmation bias (which motivates us to favour information that confirms what we already believe and to ignore information that doesn’t).

The following idea frames the content of the course: barriers to acting ethically, indeed to autonomy, are produced by psychological, social and political forces.

Then there is the service-learning aspect of Iintetho zoBomi.

This is about the students getting involved in communities and learning through one-on-one interactions with children at no-fee primary schools, helping them with English literacy and life orientation-related schoolwork. Our students learn by teaching learners material that’s related to IiNtetho zoBomi. Service learning helps bring ideas and experiences together.

Responses

We are seeing encouraging results in the form of hundreds of unsolicited comments relating to how the course has transformed the lives of our students.

Most of these comments come from student reflective journals. Lecturers read the journals as the main form of assessment of IiNtetho zoBomi. Some students even wrote articles in local media about what they had learned. In one of the articles, student Tanatswa Chivhere concludes that:

Most of us who have done the course can testify to how it made us more aware of how our thoughts and actions impact the world as a whole. IiNtetho zoBomi has changed the way in which I view my place in the world and how to use that place to better not only my life but those of others around me.