English Academy Percy Baneshik Memorial Lecture Education and

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modes of procedural learning, tangentially serving the instrumental needs of ... quotation from Leonardo da Vinci, at the height of the Italian Renaissance,.
English Academy Percy Baneshik Memorial Lecture Education and the Form of the Humanities:An ‘institutional re-membering’ Laurence Wright

Senior Research Associate North-West University South Africa [email protected]

This lecture was delivered in Cape Town on 8 May 2014 at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. The text of the lecture has been peer reviewed. South African education at all levels is currently recovering from a bad bout of ‘governance as steering’. To restore public confidence the South African academy needs consciously to embrace in its practice the intrinsic form of the humanities. This refurbished understanding will bring into clear focus the humanities’ indispensable contribution to the public good. Without it, these disciplines will continue to be perceived as decorative modes of procedural learning, tangentially serving the instrumental needs of existing government, commerce and industry. The modern conversation of the humanities, seen internationally in the rise of the influential Humboldtian-type research university, and its characteristic form, both originated in the epistemic upheaval which marked the German Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment. By restoring a more democratic educational practice that respects the essential form of the modern humanities, South Africa will avail itself of the indispensable intellectual power of these disciplines to foster, shape and critique the contours and content of South Africa’s emerging civilization. Key words: African Renaissance; Al Nahda; Francis Bacon; Bengal Renaissance; Isaiah Berlin; categorical imperative; Sydney Clouts; J. M. Coetzee; Leonardo da Vinci; Descartes; French Enlightenment; German Romanticism; Hegel; Humboldtian research university; Kant; Zakes Mda; outcomes-based education (OBE); Plato; programme approach; research governance; Socrates; South Africa; teacher education

He who loves practice without theory is like the sailor who boards ship without a rudder and compass and never knows where he may cast. (Da Vinci the Genius 2013, 49)

This trenchant quotation from Leonardo da Vinci, at the height of the Italian Renaissance, conveys his intellectual excitement as new modes of knowledge open up. The modern world beckons. Theory is the compass and rudder which points us in the right direction. English Academy Review 30 (2) 2014 ISSN: Print 1013-1752/Online 1753-5360 © The English Academy of Southern Africa DOI: 10.1080/10131752.2014.965437

Open Rubric

pp. 185–202

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From now on, discovery and invention will move much faster. No longer will ships steer according to the routine dictates of habit and tradition. But what if Leonardo’s navigational analogy is transferred from the sphere of knowledge creation and invention, where Leonardo positions it, to society and its institutions? What if we come to believe, not only that theory ought to influence governance, as it surely should, but that theory is what governance is about – applying theory to steer the ship? This notion of ‘governance as steering’ has been extremely powerful in South Africa’s efforts to transform education at all levels, and it has had perilous consequences. Let me give three symptomatic examples, starting at the top of our education system. The post-apartheid National Research Foundation (NRF) tried to steer South African humanities and social science research in preferred directions through instituting socalled ‘focus areas’. Few humanities projects matched the prescribed focus areas, with the result that many researchers gave up on the NRF. Others ‘tweaked’ their projects to fit, at some cost to intellectual integrity. ‘Theory’ had decided in advance just where South Africa’s research priorities lay (the focus areas provided the compass), and the funding rudder was applied to turn the ship firmly in that direction. The idea failed and was scrapped, illustrating little more than that the NRF (more used to administering science than the humanities) hadn’t sufficiently appreciated the ways in which the humanities typically engage society; also, that humanities academics in their research proposals had articulated their contribution to the public good rather badly. Neither side had understood, at this crucial juncture in South Africa’s history, what I call the ‘form’ of the humanities. The idea that all activity within humanities disciplines ineluctably participates in a certain ‘form’ is developed throughout this article. Suffice here to note that the term ‘form’ is used in an Aristotelian sense, in other words that the formal cause of something is (or should be) fully expressed in its characteristics. Where the humanities are reduced to a merely procedural mode of routine learning, their intrinsic form is often no longer clearly evident or adequately expressed, and as a result society tends to become sceptical, uncomprehending and critical of them. Because the form is no longer firmly inscribed or discernable in their characteristic expressions or ‘outputs’, their intrinsic ‘relevance’ is no longer apparent, and disillusionment sets in. To renovate the humanities, their form needs to be thoroughly internalized by humanities practitioners – especially educators, at all levels – so that its presence in their work is not merely gestural, but innate. The issue is important because two recent reports on the state of the humanities in South Africa display complete amnesia on the subject.1 When two serious collective efforts at analysing the perceived weakness of the humanities fail to articulate the point, there seems little exaggeration in claiming that influential sections of academia seem to have forgotten the form of the humanities. No doubt many individual academics have not. The intent of this article is to bring this form to mind once more, for the sake of the humanities as a whole, but specifically in order to remedy the decline in our education

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system; not through theoretical ‘steering’, but through radical intellectual overhaul, an ‘institutional re-membering’. In response to the perceived weakness of research performance in the humanities, the Department of Higher Education now wants to establish a range of pet research projects outside the existing system, located in a vaguely-defined national humanities and social science institute.2 If you can’t steer the big ship, build another little one. The theoretical rudder and compass have been removed from the national project and attached to a freshly-constructed life-boat which is heading off into the blue. Ask me how this helps to renovate the humanities and social sciences for South Africa as a whole and I wouldn’t be able to tell you. Turn to undergraduate university education and a major trauma of the 1990s was the so-called ‘programme approach’, another attempt at ‘governance as steering’, so that in place of a broad-based, formative, multi-disciplinary curriculum, undergraduates were encouraged to enter closed, tightly-organized inter-disciplinary programmes allegedly designed to better prepare them directly for ‘the real world’. The intellectual horizons of these programmes were pre-determined and sign-posted by those devising them. A quasi-vocational twist was applied to the purpose, subject matter and pedagogy of the humanities, while the neo-liberal economic agenda shone through with glistening clarity. Those silly universities, country-wide, which allowed themselves to be conned into this educational travesty soon back-tracked, having provided little more than embarrassing confirmation that they had been uncertain of what they were supposed to be doing in the first place. They, too, had seemingly forgotten the form of the humanities. These tertiary examples are relatively minor. The next one has cost South Africa dearly. In secondary education, ‘governance as steering’ was wonderfully exemplified by outcomes-based education (OBE), introduced to South Africa as Curriculum 2005. A school system on the verge of administrative collapse, teaching an uncertain mixture of Bantu Education, alternative education and People’s Education, and still deeply stressed by revolutionary efforts in the 1980s to make schools ungovernable, was inundated over a five year period (1994–1997) by a swathe of some 160 policy documents.3 Their implications were introduced to teachers by means of weak implementation seminars involving peremptory PowerPoint presentations and not much else. Teachers battled to make sense of the terminology, let alone the theory. Learner-centred education descended into the travesty of pupils educating themselves in groups and deciding on the ‘right answers’ while teachers sat at their desks or walked aimlessly around, trying to enact the role of a facilitator of learning rather than being a teacher. Those middleclass schools that had the background (the ‘cultural capital’) to make something of the process did so. The majority floundered. In addition to strenuous written preparation for each class, and immensely complex assessment procedures, teachers had to ‘hit’ – their terminology, not mine – some seven ‘critical outcomes’, five ‘developmental outcomes’, and between seven and ten ‘specific outcomes’ for each learning area. Seeing that things weren’t working, the response

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of the authorities was to amend and simplify the curriculum. This was the universal assumption: get the curriculum right and all will be well. Meanwhile the actual system – the reality on the ground, not the documents – continued to drift and disintegrate, despite sterling efforts from principled and diligent people to make educational progress. Things are gradually improving now, but this is no thanks to OBE. If you think about it, what was OBE but the educational incarnation of a discovery which transformed manufacturing during the industrial revolution of the 1750s? Complex products are impossible to create in one go, ex nihilo. But individual components are simple enough. First analyse your product into its component parts, manufacture them separately, and then assemble the product, piece by piece, on an assembly line in a factory. So with OBE, first define the kind of human being you want in your society, analyse the values, skills and attitudes that make up the educated individual, then design back from this model to shape a sequence of educational processes which will develop them in people from different backgrounds. Put your raw material (our children, wherever they come from) through those sequential processes (the assembly line) and, voilà, at the other end will emerge your well-educated human being. We perhaps needed reminding that Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s gothic tribute to the synthetic manufacturing processes of her day, was published in 1816, not 2005. The ‘woman on the train to Kraaifontein’ could be forgiven for asking why in the world would anyone, in or out of their right mind, attempt educational transformation in this fashion? We will be more circumspect and offer two tentative lines of explanation. The first is a matter of intellectual history. I can attempt little more than a gestural scribble here, but the effort is important because the phenomenon we are considering has ancient roots. The story starts well before Da Vinci, with Plato and Aristotle, and then jumps ahead to Francis Bacon who, in his sterling efforts to free the process of knowledge creation from authority and tradition, urged in his Novum Organum ([1620] 1899) that ‘the entire work of understanding be commenced afresh, and the mind itself be from the very outset not left to take its own course, but guided at every step’ (p. 51). Then comes Descartes, seeking a single system of theoretical knowledge to map reality, one that could be logically derived from a limited number of universally valid axioms, immune to empirical challenge. Later, the French philosophes of the eighteenth century used reason to mount fierce attacks on bigotry, religious fanaticism and superstition, and the tale reaches some kind of culmination in the nineteenth century with the rationalist dialectic of Hegel, who wrote that ‘Once the world of ideas has been transformed, reality cannot hold out for long’ ([1808] 1984, 178). Unfortunately it can. In other words, the policy-makers responsible for the educational travesties I have described, even though they themselves might not have been aware of it, were outand-out rationalists, seeking to transform reality, in this case our education system, from a position outside it. Thanks to apartheid, the new policy-makers had literally been excluded from the realities of governance, but their rationalism also placed them intellectually outside and beyond these realities.

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A second line of explanation for the fiasco emphasizes a mistaken approach to crisis management. Rationalist politics and planning usually accompany a deeply felt ideological need for radical change. The calculated poverty of Bantu education supplied just such a drastic need. But those newly in charge had no experience of nurturing educational improvement or, rather, such experience as they had didn’t match the institutional demands they faced. More used to academic conferences, position papers and blue-sky thinking, the sheer size, institutional inertia and inaccessibility of entrenched educational practice in the school system came as a shock to the reformers. To return to Da Vinci’s metaphor, the rudder was tiny and the ship huge: think of trying to steer a rowing boat by trailing a matchstick in its wake, and you have some idea of the problem. ‘Vanguardism’ can win intellectual positions in academic debate; it is hopeless as a means of institutionalizing them. As a result, rationalist policy has a disconcerting way of transcending reality, of moving so far beyond concrete procedural know-how concerning the dynamics of the system it seeks to transform that it lacks any integral means of introducing the desired change. South Africa ended up with a document-centric management system, instead of a people-centred education system. I am quite proud of the fact that when, in about 1995, the new government asked for inputs to help shape the new Education Bill, the Institute at Rhodes which I headed4 held an internal workshop and produced a response which offered the following advice (I’m paraphrasing because I no longer have the document): ‘Do not do anything until you have taken charge of the education system as a whole. Make sure that the management, delivery and quality assurance systems on the ground are in working order. Necessary curriculum development should proceed in parallel, off-site, and be thoroughly piloted before going to scale.’ Of course, the opposite happened. The system drifted for years while energies were concentrated on paper-based curriculum development. When it was eventually introduced, the new curriculum (C2005) faltered and fizzled spectacularly, especially in rural areas, because the dilapidated education system was too weak and run-down to respond effectively to the new educational philosophy, let alone fulfil its complex procedural requirements. What was to have been the show-piece symbolizing the New South Africa’s arrival turned into a debacle of note. Not least of the ironies involved was that many of those responsible probably regarded themselves as materialists of one sort or another. But then Marx himself was an incorrigible rationalist, which is why most polities that try to follow his prescripts end in a dirigiste mess. Governance as steering, governance as planning; the detached rudder and compass steering a ship that isn’t available to be steered: educational systems all over the world, both secondary and tertiary, are to varying degrees grappling with comparable problems. The aboriginal mistake, the educational ‘Fall’, if you like, emerges most clearly at the very beginning of the educational story, in the difference between Plato and Socrates. Socrates was an early advocate of truly democratic learning. He was willing to engage in philosophical discussion with anyone and everyone, in the hope that they might know

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more than he did, or contribute something uniquely valuable. Plato, by contrast, wanted to restrict radical questioning to an élite who, through philosophical investigation, would scramble out of the cave of habit and ignorance to gain access to timeless truths, thus qualifying its members to rule justly over the masses – to steer them according to the prescripts of theory. The masses themselves were left in the cave to pursue a troglodyte existence ruled by convention and fear of the unknown, waiting for illumination and direction from on high. Here we have the origin of the tension between the humanities exploited as a source of élite leadership, creating skilled ‘human resources’ to a prescribed formula in order to fill slots in governance and the economy, and the humanities as they should be practised, as a truly democratic investigation of human meaning and value, unlocking intellectual potential for all of society. I mention this ancient history because I have become more than ever convinced that in South Africa real educational transformation will only come about when we repose our hopes for educational improvement, not just in planning and planners, or management and managers, but in the people who potentially carry that improvement within themselves, in their own knowledge and educational skills, their values and attitudes, namely the teachers. We need a more Socratic democracy in education. Our school teachers have had a very raw deal, mainly because the educational planners treated them as ‘human resources’ who had merely to be fed the right curriculum documents to produce the required results. Modern teacher education places so much weight on what a teacher needs to do with and for learners, that very often an impression is created that the teacher’s only value is instrumental. He or she is merely a tool, a resource for delivering the curriculum. Such an attitude unconsciously undermines the entire educational process, because it conveys the message that education is something impersonal, disembodied and externally imposed – thereby modelling in front of each and every class exactly the opposite of the engaged, self-motivated life-long learner which the South African curriculum hopes to produce. Without an inspired and inspiring teacher, the curriculum has no living representative in the classroom, no real presence.5 I don’t want to leave the impression that I despise managers and planners, though when you look at pay scales, it is very clear just where the official valuation rests. Good planners and managers, good district offices, good subject advisors are all necessary. But the entire educational organization exists for one purpose only, and that is to see that a good teacher gets to meet her learners in a properly equipped classroom. That’s all. The contribution of the teacher is qualitatively different and vastly more important than anything the support system provides. Without the teacher, nothing happens. For twenty years the issue of teacher education has effectively been sidelined, and the question of what constitutes a good teacher remains a hot potato today, for a number of reasons. The South African Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU) is dead against evaluating teachers, resisting even attempts to ensure that matric markers are competent (Wright 2012, 5–6). Inspectors are a ‘no-no’, ostensibly because of traumatic memories of what happened under the dreaded apartheid inspectorate. Even non-departmental

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mentors from universities are required to be very circumspect in their interventions. What goes on in South Africa’s classrooms every day is only fleetingly made public, and then anonymously, in the research literature, while we all know there is a legacy of poorly educated teachers, as well as many very good ones, teaching subjects they never specialized in. How the situation is going to be sorted out I have no idea. But such contingent problems in no way detract from the truth that teachers are absolutely central to educational improvement. I have just read Jonathan Jansen’s recently published manual How to Fix South Africa’s Schools (2014), launched last month. He duly mentions the importance of teacher training. The Democratic Alliance (DA), in its 2014 election campaign, offered to put a well-trained teacher at the front of every classroom. So far so good, but at heart I differ from both. I don’t want us to produce more well-trained teachers. I want us to produce more appropriately educated human beings who become well-trained teachers. That is the only adequate and lasting solution to our education crisis, and the only way to secure the flourishing of our country’s citizenry. The system stands or falls on those who enter teacher training being already well-educated. There are too many science teachers who don’t understand science, mathematics teachers who can’t do arithmetic, English teachers who can’t write a simple paragraph in correct English, and so on. But we want more than this. I believe we want teachers who are not only well-trained and knowledgeable, capable of delivering a curriculum effectively, but people who have absorbed the lessons of one or two humanities disciplines in depth, and for their own sakes, and who actually understand what I am calling the form of the humanities, as it relates to our country. Then, in my view, they are ready to be educated and trained as teachers. * * * That is my first point, and the second is like unto it, namely, that we need to recover a rich awareness that education at all levels takes place within the form of the humanities. If we were consciously to acknowledge the form of the humanities, as articulated in our particular South African circumstances, and let it shape our research programmes, our lectures, our curricula and our classroom practices, in our schools and universities, so that we deliberately address the issues intrinsic to that form, we would not only revitalize the humanities but, other things being equal, we would have schools and universities second to none. We would also, incidentally, have properly addressed those issues that cause rationalist education planners to try and steer our systems from the outside, ineffectually, through theory. So, now to the issue: what is the form of the humanities? I want to start from some intriguing musings by J. M. Coetzee in his introduction to John Higgins’s recent book on Academic Freedom. Coetzee writes: A certain phase in the history of the university, a phase taking its inspiration from the German Romantic revival of humanism, is now, I believe, pretty much at its end. It has come to an end not just because the neo-liberal enemies of the university have succeeded in their aims . .

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. the fact is that too few of us have been humanists in heart and spirit, too many simply cardcarrying academics. (Coetzee 2013, xiii)

So it’s not just that the ‘neo-liberal enemies of the university’ have triumphed, but that the idea informing the humanities is not being successfully transmitted, because those who do understand it are increasingly outnumbered by card-carrying academics who don’t. Coetzee’s 1999 novel, Disgrace, with its satire on the ‘Cape Technical University’ (3–4), made clear enough the ways in which he thinks the neo-liberal agenda has triumphed. Published in the wake of the programme debacle at the University of Cape Town, the novel affirms that rampant university managerialism, aligned to the demands of the state subsidy system, big business and a neo-liberal economic agenda, has cuckolded the humanities and replaced them with a simulacrum suited to the needs, not of the whole society, but of middle-class economic functions. And he is also right that in consequence humanities research, the product of card-carrying academics furthering their careers, remains largely immured in the research journals, making little observable impact on the public good. At the same time (and this is my point, not Coetzee’s), the public face of the humanities has been taken over by media gurus uttering sound-bites to order. The substance of humanities’ research remains largely invisible. But this state of affairs, which is part of a world-wide phenomenon, is actually a rephrasing, rather than a consequence of, the first issue to which Coetzee draws attention, namely that a phase in the history of the university, with its roots in the German Romantic revival of humanism, may be coming to an end. Put simply, we (academics and society itself) are forgetting the intrinsic form of the humanities. To substantiate this I must range further afield, while keeping our South African predicament firmly in mind. The emergence of German Romanticism in reaction to the French Enlightenment presents an archetype of the universal form of the humanities. To be sure, this is only one specific historical instance, but it is the type which defines the form. Out of this ideological ferment grew not only the Humboldtian research university, which spread across the world, nurturing the humanities and the sciences in different national contexts, but from this same complex upheaval there also emerged the modern conversation of the humanities. Again, a brief sketch must suffice. The German Romantic revival arose initially in East Prussia, as an oppositional movement challenging the intellectual dominance of France and the French Enlightenment. The doctrines of the French thinkers rested on the belief that human nature was fundamentally the same everywhere. For writers like Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, Helvétius or Holbach, local differences were unimportant in comparison with the quest for a general system of laws and principles that would apply to all human societies. Condorcet, for instance, could write: ‘It is not in the positive knowledge of laws established among men that one ought to seek for knowledge which he may adopt; it is in reason alone’ (in Cassirer 1951, 252). The triumphs of Newtonian physics in the sphere of inanimate nature had inspired hopes that a comparable system of

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law-governed regularities might be discovered for human society. Laws of reason should apply equally to man and the universe. Inequitable political dispensations, the outcome of unjust, oppressive and self-interested laws, could be displaced through applying the universal rule of reason. The famous Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert was conceived, in the words of David Bates, as ‘a highly organised knowledge machine that would demonstrate the interconnection of all forms of enquiry’ (2001, 8). In this fashion, humanity was to be rescued from hopeless thraldom to gormless traditionalism, unthinking dogma and irrational superstition, and set on an upward path towards social justice, happiness and wisdom. Naturally such optimism met challenges. The new literature of travel and exploration, scanning strange and exotic cultures across Asia and the Americas, threw up abundant empirical evidence that societies were indeed fundamentally different, an awkward fact usually explained, or explained away, by variations in climate, geography and natural resources. Nevertheless, the conviction survived that the core aims and objects of humanity were fundamentally similar and congruent: food, shelter and security; but also justice, social harmony, the opportunity to realize natural talents and nurture moral attainments – what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, human flourishing, or ‘the good life’. This was the powerful set of universalizing projects and beliefs which so affronted the German Romantics. Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century was a backwater. The Romantic reaction germinated in an atmosphere of national abjection, a sense that French intellect ruled the roost, while Germany, her traditional cultures and values, was out in the cold, disrespected and unvalued. She had been outshone first by Italy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, then by Spain and England, and now the Low Countries were flourishing. Above all, France dominated Europe politically and culturally, so much so that in the mid-eighteenth century, Emperor Frederick the Great set out to inject aspects of modernizing French Enlightenment culture into East Prussia, the most backward of his provinces, introducing elements of military, social and bureaucratic rationalization. In doing so he provoked an almighty backlash among its semi-feudal Protestant inhabitants. A significant spokesman was the cranky Königsberg theologian and philosopher J. G. Hamann. Originally a supporter of the Enlightenment, Hamann began to rail against generalizing Enlightenment thought, couched as it was in the elegant smoothness and sophistication of French intellect. Against the objective systems and categories propounded by the French thinkers, Hamann ranged the ineffable validity of concrete personal and social experience. He inveighed against abstractions: ‘When data are given to you’, he writes, ‘why do you need ficta’ (in Berlin 2013, 250). All the prejudices of a basically oral/aural society were thrown against the notion that the formulations of science, or the generalizing systems of an emergent sociology, could outweigh the inner voice of the individual. Originality, genius, alone penetrates to the heart of human experience, and defines its living essence, while abstract science, as

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Wordsworth would later put it, ‘murder[s] to dissect’ (‘The Tables Turned’ [1798] 1969, 377). Hamann’s brilliant disciple, J. G. Herder, joined him in taking deliberate aim at the sociological assumptions of the Enlightenment. Until we liberate ourselves from impersonal, scientific thought, Herder held, we cannot really understand others or enter into their societies or cultures, we cannot empathize. To really understand society is to understand it from within, as a community united by tradition, memory and language; by impalpable ties of feeling that are ultimately untranslatable. He lauded the notion of Einfühlung (‘feeling into’), as the only means of really understanding a work of art, a culture, a people, or a historical period. Above all, he recognized the overwhelming need humans have, to belong. In blatant defiance of the Enlightenment project, from Herder issues the modern recognition of three ineluctable social realities: populism, the will to social self-expression, and the need for pluralism.6 I have attempted this brash travesty of intellectual history for two reasons. First, as I said, the Humboldtian research university, to which Coetzee refers, grew out of this German romantic culture, establishing a model which overtook the founding medieval models exemplified by Bologna and Paris. More importantly, the character of the German response to the Enlightenment, expressed in its literature, philosophy and social analysis, worked its way into the warp and weft of European thought, both inside and outside of the universities, and established what I understand to be the abiding form of the humanities. The humanities have always been explicitly comparative, and from the time of the German Romantics the humanities conversation has taken the form of an academic, political and artistic colloquy or debate between the ideas and principles of the European Enlightenment (and its historical derivatives) and the lived realities of diverse communities, national, regional and local, round the world, including those of South Africa. In England the dialectic was succinctly captured by John Stuart Mill when he wrote: By Bentham [the hard-nosed utilitarian] . . . men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true?, and by Coleridge [the Germanizing Romantic], What is the meaning of it? The one took his stand outside the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it: the other looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it . . .’ (Mill 1950, 102–103, my interpolations)

This formal tension between ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’ is the driving force of the humanities’ conversation, the arena of debate within which our discussions are framed, and the horizon beyond which learning can hardly be articulated. The simplest way of expressing the position is to say that all education systems subsist within the form of the humanities, and should be practised within it, rather than regarding it as merely one distinctive set of traditional subjects in a rationalist education system comprised largely, in the case of the humanities, of leisure-class decorations addressing an outdated desire for a ‘rounded education’, which is what

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they are in danger of becoming. I should add that in the humanities basket I include not only the traditional subjects, literature, philosophy, history, mathematics, and so forth, but sociology, law and education. My scientist friends must now take a deep breath – I’m very fond of them – because it is also true, in the sense I am outlining, that the sciences likewise have their being wholly and completely within the form of the humanities. What is at stake here is not the Kantian point that all knowledge (including science) is, ineluctably, human knowledge, nor the economistic one that the society which pays for science should benefit from it. More important than either of these is the intrinsic power of science to influence and transform human understanding, to re-shape world-views, through its educational impact. That is the sense in which science can and should subsist within the form of the humanities. An alert and informed conversation between scientific ‘truth’ and human ‘meaning’, scientific ‘meaning’ and human ‘truth’, contributes immeasurably to the renovation of human culture. It should be apparent that the epistemic convulsion I have been describing in eighteenth century Germany is not just an instance of tepid, out-of-date intellectual history, academic fun-and-games.7 Similar and comparable contests play themselves out in societies round the world, following a cline of intensity ranging from local squabbles to all-out political conflagration. These issues define South Africa today. Regardless of who currently ‘wins’, who is on top and who squirms under the forces of oppression or marginalization, such contests are urgent, for they are haunted in international memory by the twin horrors of the guillotine and the jackboot. On the one hand stands the minatory example of the French Revolution, that violent upheaval whose aim was to bludgeon the social ideals of the Enlightenment into being by physically destroying the old order (Bates 2001, 73: 17–19). On the other, wherever the free creative spirit lauded by the German Romantics takes fire and identifies passionately with the inwardness of a community, a culture, a race, or a nation, abandoning universalizing principles of adjudication, it is only a short step to Fascism and National Socialism, as happened in the Second World War (Berlin 2013, 589–604). In South Africa these embryonic issues are ‘worlding’ all round us, as Heidegger might say. We cannot escape them. Surely they are sufficiently compelling to drive a conscious refurbishment of the humanities, from long-term historical projects, to immediate socio-political analysis. South Africa’s 2014 elections, for instance, were very much a confused contest between historic political meanings and contemporary political truths. Between the two, a great gulf yawns. The purpose of the humanities is not only to bridge this gulf intellectually, insofar as progress in the humanities makes this conceivable, but to resolve it in society, to heal it – a much more challenging task which depends overwhelmingly on the broad field of education for its fulfilment. What would a solution look like? That ominous word ‘gulf’ reminds me of a poem by Sydney Clouts with the prescient title, ‘Professor Gulf’, where the speaker urges that ‘The problem of our time’ is ‘how to confirm/ in men their

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source/ their primal nature/ inward as a people’; and the prophetic image which points to a resolution follows immediately: Pineneedles interconnecting high Into their own pure region are by nation, pinetrees. (1985, 126)

Each tree, each culture, each nation or community, is nourished through its own trunk, but the overarching canopy forming their collective outgrowth creates one intermeshed civilization, perhaps a global one, sheltering the whole. The biological image (though vested here in a colonial vehicle, the pinetree) is optimistic, suggesting that social intermeshing and mutual exploration take place naturally as part of ordinary organic growth and development. The reality is more complex. South Africa has made large strides towards ensuring some return to ‘the ordinary’ (cf. Taylor 1989, Ndebele 1991, Alexander 2002). But Clouts’s metaphor may also intimate that the sheer complexity of the engagement, of the ‘inter-meshing’ required, is beyond anything that might be achieved by fiat, using company policy, party rules, religious edicts or legislated quotas, in other words, through collective ‘steering’. It has instead to be realized in freedom, person by person, through mutual encounter and shared enterprise. To be sure, Berlin’s ‘negative liberty’ – freedom from oppressive and unnecessary barriers and constraints – would be insufficient to catalyse this development (Berlin 2008, 169–178). There has also to be a positive and enabling legislative environment, including appropriate affirmative action and BBBEE8 policies. This is in place. But the purposeful fostering of societal cohesion and democratic coherence belongs firmly in the realm of education, person by person, whether it be familial socialization, workplace training, religious education, community programmes, schooling, technical education, or university study. How important, then, that these seminal human conversations respond intelligently to the form of the humanities as contingently shaped by circumstances in South Africa today. For we live under a cherished Constitution which is largely a product of the European Enlightenment, its elements consciously borrowed and adapted from successful postEnlightenment constitutions world-wide. The Constitution frames a sequence of universalizing propositions and assumptions about human goals and conduct in society, even though these are far from being fully realized in our national life. Undergirding them is that universalizing principle of civilization from which all else follows; in the intellectual language of Kant, the categorical imperative: ‘Act only on that maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it would become a universal law’ (Kant 2005, 38). The essence of what Kant is saying is a staple of traditional ethical thought: the Golden Rule of the ancient Greeks, ‘do as you would be done by’; the Christian ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you’; the Confucian precept, ‘Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself’. Similar dicta can be found in Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, in Taoism, Sikhism and Jainism, as well as in ancient

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Egypt (Spooner 1914, 310–12). The jurisprudence informing and interpreting the South African Constitution seeks to remedy the injustices of apartheid along just these lines (Ackerman 2004, 650).9 There is sublime simplicity and beauty in this ethical dispensation, a secure and principled basis upon which to build; but patently there are today elements in society less than fully in accord with its propositions. Some despise gender equality, or wilfully undermine the constitutional protection of the separation of powers, or infringe individual liberty of conscience through political or religious intimidation; others want to curb freedom of expression, or re-introduce the death penalty, or reduce the power and status of traditional leaders, or roll back gay rights, or stall on ‘Green’ issues, or preserve polygamy and genital mutilation, and so on. There are many counter ‘truths’, and contrary ‘meanings’ at work in the various clashings and meshings underway within the sheltering tree-canopy of our emergent civilization. These different encounters form the subject matter of the humanities, our unique dialogue between the abstract Enlightenment heritage of ‘reason’ and ‘truth’ (and its subsequent heritage of critique), and the concrete legacy of historical ‘truths’ and ‘meanings’ acquired from South Africa’s past. As was the case with the Prussian reaction to the French Enlightenment, the struggle with historical meaning runs deep in the South African psyche. As educators, we have to recognize that for complex reasons much of our country lives in a state of utter spiritual abjection. What do I mean by this? Not merely the failures of so-called ‘service delivery’, awful though these are, nor the ravages of HIV/Aids, nor decades of dispossession, nor joblessness, nor dejection at the often weak performance of political representatives. At base, people struggle with a fugitive identity which has cruelly evaded them historically, something permanently misplaced under a heritage of oppression, whether as the descendants of indentured labourers, dispossessed peasants, hunter-gatherers uprooted from the land, former slaves, migrant factory workers or miners, rootless fortune hunters – a huge variety of disparate communities of diverse ethnic origin – all of whom seek an enhanced sense of security, identity, belonging and achievement. South African township funerals, for example, may seem to middle-class people excessive, financially crippling and exploitative, but symbolically they represent culminating affirmations of life as it should be, and as it never was. Like Toloki and Noria in Zakes Mda’s novel Ways of Dying (1995), and despite surface appearances, at a deep level large sections of South Africa’s people are full-time mourners. They are grieving inwardly. When I find myself galled by the lavishness of governmental excess, the silly parties and project launches that accompany governmental activity at every level, I find myself recalling Hamlet’s wry comment at his own moment of regime change: ‘Thrift, thrift Horatio. The funeral meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’ (1.2.179-80). In celebrating the advent of liberated modernity, at openings, ribboncuttings, departmental inaugurations, and so on, South Africans are also mourning their subterranean losses. The overarching form of the humanities suggests that South African education, at all levels, requires a probing and systematic dialogue between the

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assumptions of the Constitution (an abstract document, that theoretical rudder by which we steer), and South Africa’s people as they actually are, their real beliefs, ontologies, philosophies, and goals, in all their diversity. This is what I mean by the ‘form’ of the humanities: a broad-based dialogue, sustained in probing published research and conscientious public dissemination, the whole consciously expressing a rigorous and continuing recursive encounter between South Africa’s inherited meanings and truths, and the societal goals set out in the Constitution, including their ethical and performative requirements and justifications. Without this dialogue, South Africa will in all likelihood lose the benefits of the civilization-shaping discourse of the humanities, which could lapse into a sclerotic form of procedural tertiary education focused solely on the class-based needs of existing commerce, government and industry. Should that happen, J. M. Coetzee will have been proved correct. The age of the Humboldtian-style research university, for us, will be over. South Africa will have neutralized the engine of intellectual capacity-building which alone can lead the country into a more equitable, flourishing future. Far from down-playing the humanities in favour of concentration on the STEM9 disciplines, we should recognize that the humanities exist to build the social context in which those important disciplines find traction and their justification. This can only be done if we learn to acknowledge the form of the humanities in South Africa, and pursue its implications rigorously. Humanities research programmes need more consciously to locate themselves within this form, announce their situated relevance clearly, and find innovative ways to engage citizens, rather than merely contribute inertly to international research literature. They need observe no ‘nationalizing’ boundarymarkers, as long as they demonstrate innovation and human cogency in addressing the form of the humanities. For school teachers, the explicit demands of the formal curriculum need to be complemented by their own implicit understandings of their learners’ mental habitus, where they come from, helping them both to appreciate their origins and anticipate the demands of the occupation or environment they are aiming for. Of course teachers must focus on the curriculum, but they should also model its purpose in their demeanour and conduct, and in their sensitivity to what lies far beyond it. They, too, need to live out the form of the humanities, linking the formal curriculum to the situated needs of the child (the informal curriculum) in ways that help nurture a profound belonging. This would be educationally normal. Healthy societies continually engage in systematic self-assessment. They raid ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’ (Arnold 1965, 113), in order to re-shape themselves and resuscitate their fortunes, without abandoning their pasts. Just prior to the period in Germany that we have been speaking about, Italy, England, France and Holland had hauled themselves out of their so-called ‘dark ages’ – which intellectually were not nearly as dark as once was thought – through a return to Graeco-Roman learning. In India, the Bengal Renaissance, from early in the nineteenth century to the death of Tagore in 1941, was an intellectual effort

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to measure India’s cultural strengths and weaknesses against what had been learned under the British Raj and from the West in general. The socio-political movement nurtured India’s indigenous culture, while promoting progress in science and literature based on western models, and mobilizing resistance to outmoded and unacceptable traditional practices such as sati, child-marriage, caste divisions and untouchability. Its influence was felt across much of India (Samanta 2008). In Egypt, the Al Nahda (or renaissance) movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an indigenous reform movement, sparked in part by the generous assessment of French civilization returned by Rifa’a el-Tahtawy when he was sent to Paris in 1826 as Imam to some Egyptian cadets training at the French military academy (Gran 2002). Its influence was fleetingly felt right across the Arab world. Our own African Renaissance, which died a death following the political decline of Thabo Mbeki, was a comparable effort to reassess African and South African values in the context of a fully globalized world economy (Makgoba, ed. 1999). It deserves revalidation.11 But the form of the humanities does not require such conspicuous intellectual movements in order to be effective (though I suspect that our Department of Higher Education rather wants the trumpets to sound). What it does require is for the country’s education system to accept that this is the shape of the comprehensive dialogue that South Africa needs to have with itself, if it is to achieve an educated polity with the wisdom and skill to bring about transformation which is not merely change – anything one does will achieve some sort of change – but substantial improvement in the quality of life for all South Africans. It is not a matter of using the humanities to dragoon disenchanted majorities or recalcitrant minorities into accepting the ethical and political consensus proposed by the Constitution, but of helping all components of the society, in its local, national and international dimensions, to understand themselves, to better recognize the social implications of their beliefs, and to read not only their own practices but those of their critics, with greater understanding. If we assume that the purpose of the humanities is simply to woo learners and students – our future citizenry – holus bolus into the norms and standards of western society under the aegis of the Constitution, then we really haven’t been paying attention. The point of education is to produce citizens who understandingly choose to serve an inclusive civilization. To conclude: How are we to achieve this? It’s very simple. Build from the bottom. Let all teachers do a good BA or BSc, require that they do so, before they begin to study education, so that they have the opportunity to internalize the form of the humanities. Educate them to degree level as human beings, rigorously, in two or three demanding disciplines. They will then be less likely to become alienated conveyors of Gradgrindian ‘facts’(cf. Dickens 1998) – mere rationalist instruments of oppression – and more likely to develop into wonderful creators of civilization, people who teach well because the knowledge lives in them, and not just in the books. The future of our country will then

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reside where it belongs, with the people themselves, and not in the fevered imaginations of policy-makers.

Notes 1 The Consensus Study on the State of the Humanities produced by the Academy of Science of South Africa (2011); and the Charter for the Humanities and Social Sciences Report published by the Department of Higher Education and Training (2011). 2 The proposals have been roundly criticized. See for example comments by the Council on Higher Education (2013). The reference to ‘pet projects’ refers to the fact that the projects in question arose out of the somewhat idiosyncratic ‘Charter for the Humanities’ initiative, rather than being selected on merit, following a broad-based, democratic, system-wide call for research proposals, in a selection process administered by a body such as the NRF. 3 Sayed, Jusuf. 2011. Education Policy and the current crisis in South African schooling. Seminar at Rhodes University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research, August 2011. http://www.ru.ac.za/latestnews/name,41230,en.html (accessed 14 May 2014). 4 Rhodes University’s Institute for the Study of English in Africa. 5 This paragraph draws on Wright (2012, 141). The entire book, South Africa’s Education Crisis, stresses the importance of educating teachers in order to achieve substantive improvement in the quality of education. See also Wright (2013) for the specific teacher education strategy which underlies the writing of the book. 6 The account of German reaction to the French Enlightenment adumbrated in this lecture relies on Berlin (2008, 2013), Cassirer (1951) and Bates (2001). 7 This is a difficult point to sustain, mostly because by the time one has made it those of a scientific persuasion require mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It is nevertheless true. Jimi Adeshina, currently a professor of sociology at the University of the Western Cape, recounted a conversation with a shack-dweller concerning the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project (pers. comm.). Having asked whether this kind of expensive, large-scale research wasn’t felt as a political affront, given this person’s impoverished circumstances, the reply came as a surprise. It was, in effect: ‘Why do you assume poor people aren’t interested in the stars and the nature of the universe?’ The anecdote underlines the need for a more Socratic, less élitist, approach to education, not merely in order to recruit future scientists, but in order for science to make its indispensable cultural contribution. • BBBEE: Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment. 9 In his Metaphysics of Morals (1785, 2005), where he expresses the ‘categorical imperative’, Kant specifically rejects that form of the principle known as the ‘Golden Rule’ because it submits outcomes to the ethical whims of the individual. Likewise, the concept of ubuntu, which arose as a practise regulating the treatment of strangers in a dispersed, small-scale, clan-based dispensation, has to re-orientate itself to a pluralistic, large-scale, multicultural world which demands a universalizing ethic. It is no longer a question of treating strangers well provided they conform to clan mores, but of respecting and defending the rights of others to be different. For

English Academy Percy Baneshik Memorial Lecture 201 instance, the noxious phrase ‘our people’ sometimes used in governmental discourse reflects a deficient appreciation of this universalizing ethic. 10 STEM: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics. 11 The ‘African Renaissance’ is an important notion which requires clarification because, as articulated by former president Thabo Mbeki and others at the turn of the millennium (see Makgoba 1999), the concept wobbled between sentimental faux nostalgia, a serious quest for the recuperation of useable pasts, nationalism versus internationalism, pan-Africanism, and a forthright drive for modernization, without signalling that some of these aims and ideals might be incompatible or require intelligent mutual adjustment.

References Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). 2011. Consensus Study on the State of the Humanities in South Africa: Status, Prospects and Strategies. Pretoria: ASSAf. Ackerman, L. W. H. 2004. The Legal Nature of the South African Constitutional Revolution. New Zealand Law Review (4): 633–680. Alexander, Neville. 2002. An Ordinary Country. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Arnold, Matthew. [1869] 1965. Culture and Anarchy. The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold. ed. R.. H. Super, vol. 5. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bacon, Francis. [1620] 1899. Novum Organum. The Works of Francis Bacon. ed. James Spedding et al., vol. 4. London: Longmans. Bates, David. 2001. Idols and Insight: An Enlightenment Topography of Knowledge. Representations 73: 1–23. Berlin, Isaiah. [1973] 2013. The Counter Enlightenment. In The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer, 243–268. London: Vintage Books. Berlin, Isaiah. 2008. Liberty. ed. Henry Hardy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1951. The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettigrove. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Clouts, Sydney. 1985. Professor Gulf. In Sydney Clouts: Collected Poems. ed. M. Clouts and C. Clouts. Cape Town: David Philip. 126–127. Coetzee, J. M. 1999. Disgrace. London: Vintage, 2000. Coetzee, J. M. 2013. Foreword. Academic Freedom in a Democratic South Africa by John Higgins. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. xi–xv. Condorcet, Nicholas de. [1847] 1951. Essai sur les assembelées provincials, second part, art. VI. In The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Cassirer 1951, 252. Council on Higher Education. 2013. Comment on the Draft Regulations for the Establishment of a National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. http://www.che.ac.za/sites/ default/files/publications/CHE%20Comment%20on%20the%20Draft%20Regulations%20 for%20the%20Establishment%20of%20a%20National%20Institute%20for%20the%20Humanities%20and%20Social%20Sciences.pdf (accessed 30 May 2014). Da Vinci the Genius. 2013. International Exhibition. Official Programme. Victoria, Australia: Black Rock.

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Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET). 2011. Charter for the Humanities and Social Sciences Report. Pretoria: DHET. Dickens, Charles. 1998. Hard Times. ed. Paul Schlicke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gran, Peter. 2002. Tahtawi in Paris. Al-Ahram Weekly Online. Issue 568 (10–16 January). http:// weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/568/cu1.htm (accessed 19 May 2014). Hamann, Johan Georg. 2013. Briefwechsel. ed. Walther Ziesemer and Arthur Henkel. Wiesbaden and Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, vol. 6: 331. In The Counter Enlightenment, Berlin 2013, 250. Hegel, G. W. F. [1808] 1984. Letter to Friedrich Niethammer, 28 October. Hegel: The Letters. trans. Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 178–179. Jansen, Jonathan and Molly Blank. 2014. How to Fix South Africa’s Schools: Lessons from Schools that Work. Johannesburg: Bookstorm. Kant, Immanuel. [1785] 2005. Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals. trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott. New York: Dover Publications. Makgoba, Malegapuru William. 1999. African Renaissance. Sandton: Mafube; Cape Town: Tafelberg. Mda, Zakes. 1995. Ways of Dying. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Mill, John Stuart. 1950. Mill on Bentham and Coleridge. ed. F. R. Leavis. London: Chatto & Windus. Ndebele, Njabulo. 1991. Rediscovery of the Ordinary: Essays on South African literature and culture. Johannesburg: COSAW. Samanta, Soumyajat. 2008. The Bengal Renaissance: A critique. 20th European Conference of South-Asian Studies. Manchester, UK. http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/savifadok/151/1/ Samanta_BengalRenaissance.pdf (accessed 19 May 2014). Shakespeare, William. 1997. Hamlet. The Norton Shakespeare. New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company. Spooner, W. A. 1914. The Golden Rule. Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. ed. James Hastings, vol. 6, 310-312. New York: Charles Scribner’s. Taylor, Charles. 1989. The Sources of the Self: the making of the modern identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wordsworth, William. 1969. Wordsworth: Poetical Works. ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selincourt. London: Oxford University Press. Wright, Laurence, ed. 2012. South Africa’s Education Crisis: Views from the Eastern Cape. Grahamstown: NISC. Wright, Laurence. 2013. Towards ‘Discourse 4’: Re-orientating research discourse to address a key aspect of South Africa’s education crisis. Southern African Review of Education. 19 (1): 23–37. LAURENCE WRIGHT is a Senior Research Fellow at North-West University, South Africa. He was formerly H. A. Molteno Professor of English and Director of the Institute for the Study of English in Africa at Rhodes University. He writes on South African language policy, the humanities and the public good, South African poetry, and Shakespeare and the history of Shakespeare in South Africa. Elected to the South African Academy of Science, he is also Honorary Life President of the Shakespeare Society of Southern Africa and VicePresident of the English Academy of Southern Africa.