Blog: Profile of a University Student

At different epochs in the young history of our university, we have paused to enquire about the profile of a typical university student. He is not a student who needs to be spoon-fed. In fact the major distraction in the upper secondary system lies in narrowing knowledge to the strict frontiers dictated by the syllabus and learning only for what is examinable.

Exams questions are so predictable that the able teacher can easily anticipate areas that may be tested so that teaching is geared towards them. The method of transmission is archaic because it makes the teacher do all through chalk and talk or through distribution of handouts so that the learner who understands, store and regurgitate on request is the fortunate winner. Unfortunately one whom we call the laureate is the product of a cloistered temple of learning with limited borders, well defined territories and predetermined frontiers. Knowledge which is genuine is borderless; the definition imposed by a syllabus is a mere pretext. The secondary school student does not read novels, knows little about literature beyond the textbooks prescribed. His science is limited to the reasoning behind the chapters studied and beyond the microscopic world he knows, his ignorance floats in empty, unchartered space.

Whose fault? We are all guilty of smothering the imagination of the child. The learner himself knows what he wants and categorically refuses to learn what he should know. Ask a student of Form IV to write a page on the budget from the newspaper cuttings or oral media discussions. Even parents are known to have said that this does not concern pupils of that age. Ask a pupil to give you the summary of a novel read a fortnight ago. You seem to have come from another planet and you will be summarily refused by the pupil. Pupils dictate what they must know and limit themselves to that. Both method and content are in league against the blossoming of the leader's intellect.

The university unfortunately becomes an extension of the secondary school system. A few university lecturers who want to bonify their salary already practice a conservative pedagogy that convinces students of the correctness of the medium.

The university student is capable of reconstructing meaning for knowledge in the arable, wild land of ideas. New ideas are fascinating, savage, rough, challenging and hostile. The academic learns how to tame ideas, to trace their contours, understand their kinship with other ideas, establishes a hierarchy and seeks to recreate new ideas from the old, new meanings from old ideas. It is through the wrestler with new ideas that the university student asserts himself. A spoon-feeding agent prevents one from having a personalised taste of new ideas. One's senses should touch, feel, taste ideas.

The university student must situate himself in the continuum of the best ideas ventilated in the subject of interest. The past is an essential ingredient of the future. Without commanding the past the student cannot cultivate an analytical mind, a creative approach to reality. In fact the university student's sense of reality distinguishes itself from the narrowly consumable approach to it. The whole has to be understood before parts are analysed. Physics cannot be the only subject one specialises in. A horizontal and vertical approach to science should relate Physics to other domains of science. A student of literature should develop a searching interest in sculpture, dance, painting, cinema, music and become a total artist/critic. Knowing a few textbooks prescribed by a university does not make of one a university student in the Arts.

The engagement of the university student in social life is a sine qua non of tertiary education. An academic who does not have his feet planted in the twisted, gnarled reality around him is a sterile egoist, or worse, a feckless egomaniac. If sharing knowledge is an inevitable concomitant of tertiary education, the production of new knowledge through research is his main raison d'être. By this standard, most of our university graduates are impotent selfworshippers. If we call universities platforms where we cultivate excellence, this extraordinariness must be put to the service of society at its riskiest. Politicians should be subservient to the best of brains in universities. Too often unfortunately it is in universities that you will find intellectuals with potted thinking, biased and fanatical. These are antithetical to the respectable intellectuals who rise above ephemeral success or short-lived merit.

Every lecturer of a university has a responsibility. If the Minister of Tertiary Education had held his intended meetings with Heads of Departments, it would have signed an epitaph for further education. Thank God, he was stopped on time. Knowledge does not need politicians. Politicians need knowledge.