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Jonathan Jansen:Commentator, teacher, leader
If you are going to talk about the state of the South African education establishment, the man to talk to is Professor Jonathan D. Jansen. As a former Fulbright Scholar at Stanford University and dean of education at the University of Pretoria – with a master’s degree from Cornell University and an honorary doctorate in Education from the University of Edinburgh – Prof. Jansen’s academic credentials alone more than qualify him as an expert on the subject. More importantly, however, is his current position as rector and vice chancellor of the University of the Free State (UFS), where he had to oversee the fallout of the much-publicised Reitz Four saga.
Having also been a high-school biology teacher, Prof. Jansen’s experiences make him one of the few people with insight into the education system, from both the ivory tower and the coal face.
Leadership met with him shortly after the launch of his two new books, We Need to Talk and Oor Bokdrolletjies en Rosyntjies – both of which are collections of his newspaper columns.
You are a very prolific columnist, a published author, rector, vice chancellor and lecturer at UFS as well as a social commentator. Where do you find the time?
Even since my student days, I’ve always been doing 20 things at the same time. I suppose I’m an adult who qualifies for Ritalin!
But I love writing. If I’m a day without writing, I’m depressed. And I’m fascinated by South African society, so I’m constantly thinking and debating and writing about it.
If I didn’t have two columns to write every week, if I didn’t have opportunities to speak about what’s going on in the country, the rest of my work would be quite boring.
Writing is like eating to me. You never say: where do you find time to eat? You just do it. I’m in that space when it comes to writing – I just do it.
I organise my time fairly well so, for example, I never have meetings that go on for longer than an hour.
The second thing is that I delegate well, so I surround myself with people who are much smarter than me and who enjoy doing their work.
And that gives you more time to write?
Well, it also gives me more time for the students, it gives me more time to teach.
And the secret to the writing is: I write very fast, so I can write a column in about 10 minutes.
Regarding your writing, you tend to have very definite but educated opinions on matters and you are not afraid to speak your mind. You correctly predicted that outcomes-based education (OBE) would fail. Putting aside the politics of implementing OBE, why were you so sure of its failure?
Actually, it was two things: One is that I’d been a teacher for a while, and I’d actually worked in schools – black schools. So I knew about schools. And second, I was trained to study schools, how to analyse schools.
So when OBE came around, I used those two lenses, if you will, and I said this is ridiculous.
It makes no sense from the point of view of education curriculum and it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing in the world of practice.
I used to pray that I was wrong because I don’t have an ego about these things. I like the schools to work. I like our children to get well served.
But I really hoped at the time that there would be sensible people who would say: “You know we don’t like what this guy is saying, but maybe he’s right.” There weren’t people like that. Those were the days of 1994 to 1996. We believed as South Africans that we could do anything.
We were overconfident?
We were arrogant. We thought we were the only ones who went through trauma, and we were the only ones who could be an example to everybody else, and we called ourselves the Rainbow Nation and blah, blah, blah – and it wasn’t true in the real world.
Are you suggesting the education system at the time did not need an overhaul?
No, it definitely did need an overhaul – there’s no question about it.
The way they went about it was to say that everything (about the old system) was wrong; they threw out the proverbial baby with the bath water. And the baby in this was that our schools were actually quite good at teaching the basics: we could teach how to read, teach how to write.
I remember teaching in Vredenburg and watching primary school teaching with teachers who didn’t have diplomas, but they were bloody good – even if it was just recitation of their multiplication tables and reading Sannie and Jannie. The teachers had a sense of what works in conveying the basics, and then came these guys who said: “You’re all idiots; wipe out whatever you think you know to be true and here’s your learning outcomes, here’s your this and that.”
So what do we actually need to do in order to improve our education system?
We need to take stock of ourselves and just make sure the kids can read and write appropriately – the other stuff will come.
And then, in a very simple way, to deal with transformation issues. If the kids aren’t learning the right history, put it in; but do it in a way that doesn’t disrupt the basics. I think that’s what we need to do.
Part of good curriculum planning and good teaching is to teach questioning; to develop the curiosity of the kids; to have basic science equipment, so kids can experiment for themselves – that’s the kind of thing we really should be focusing on.
Let the teachers do the basics – they do that well anyway – and then just make sure the way in which they expand the repertoires of teaching is to include critical thinking, reasoning and writing.
But don’t go and tell teachers that they’re idiots and that therefore everything must change.
So that is where the problem with OBE really lies: when you cripple the confidence of the teachers, you cripple the confidence of the entire class?
Absolutely. Teaching is a very vulnerable profession. So when you keep hearing that you’re no good and you need to re-learn everything, you think you’re a poor teacher.
And there is the problem of transformation, which is something of which you have had very practical experience at UFS. Do you find that the white student body still has a problem with a non-white placed in charge of their intellectual future, or is that a problem you have overcome?
That’s not a problem anymore. I think it was a problem in the beginning, both at Pretoria University and at Free State when I started here.
People didn’t know you necessarily and then the more people started to know you – especially my students – the more they realised: “You know, this guy actually doesn’t have a racial agenda. He connects with us in our residences and he calls our parents at home.”
If you follow me on Facebook, you’ll see both black and white students constantly in euphoria about what’s happening on campus and feeling free to raise their issues with the campus security or the academic standards in some of the classes.
You build trust so that when there’s a crisis, the students trust you to deal with the crisis.
Basically, the key to your success has been to make yourself available to the students? Is this an approach you would advocate for all tertiary institutions?
I think so, yes. I get asked a lot to speak on leadership at different universities and corporates, and people ask that question.
I think you have to have two things if you run a professional organisation, including a university: You have to have a very strong sense of compassion for your followers, but also a strong sense of discipline. And knowing when to use one or the other is really the secret to running an effective organisation.
The compassion is important because, in a university, there are a lot of students who come from difficult environments – economically and socially – and the last thing I want to do, is to give that kid a rough time. You have to express love as an emotion as a really crucial part of leadership.
Having done that, and having built trust, you have to say what’s acceptable and what’s not.
I am sure you are aware of the University of Cape Town (UCT) selection criteria for its medical school, where the different race groups have different results benchmarks as their minimal requirements?
That is simply wrong – that is called racism in my book.
But UCT is trying to address an actual problem, and this seems to be the only solution it can think of.
In other words, they’re not thinking.
I think we’re all concerned about the same thing, so I’m not questioning the equity motive. I, for one, want black kids to get access to a formal education at a university like UCT, but you don’t do it by reinforcing their sense of racial and ethnic identity.
There are many ways in which you can access a child’s potential. Using the marks is only one thing – don’t make it the whole thing, and don’t attach racial labels to it. Interview the kids; look at other ways in which they contribute to society; look at letters of reference; look at arguments that students make in favour of why they want the medical degree to begin with.
The best universities in the world do that. They don’t just look at a silly thing called marks. When you begin to do that, you get a much fuller picture of the student because the kids who went to school in Khayelitsha are not going to get the same marks as the kid who went to SACS.
Find more sophisticated ways of measuring potential. A kid with just six A’s mustn’t be in medical school.
He must not be in medical school?
No, definitely not.
That is a fairly abrasive statement to make.
No it’s not abrasive.
I studied at the best universities in the world; they don’t accept only the straight-A students into medical school.
It’s not abrasive, it’s common sense. You need an overall sense of the person.
Now, if a kid gets straight B’s from Livingstone (High), but that kid works on his/her own time as a volunteer at an Aids centre in Langa, I would take that student any day over a kid with straight A’s.
But surely in terms of medicine, there is no denying that the intellectual capacity is an important aspect. If you cannot understand basic biology, it does not matter how compassionate you are – you cannot be a doctor.
Let me tell you something: If you took my Matric marks, I wouldn’t get into a South African university, and yet I’m running one. In other words, if you had cut off my potential as a kid from a Cape Flats school called Steenberg High, I would be selling fish or the (Cape) Argus on the corner.
My point is: if I had the same opportunities, if I saw all the science equipment that I should have seen, then of course I would have done better (in Matric). Fortunately for me, I had people who looked at the other things I was doing – the fact that I was a student leader, the fact that I was able to write better than most people, etc.
I’m not saying that I didn’t have intellectual capacity; all I’m saying is that I needed more opportunity to grow and demonstrate that I could do things – and that’s the case for many of our students.
So you would suggest that universities need to broaden their selection criteria?
Absolutely, without having to reduce it to race and just marks.
And by not doing that, they are actually limiting themselves?
They’re cutting off kids who, with just a little bit of a push, with a little bit of academic support, a little bit of recognition, would actually do very, very well.
Zaid Kriel
My point being that i agree with Prof Jansen that Universities need to broaden their selection criteria, as i am of the opinion that i had been disadvantaged because of only looking at my academic record, overlooking my potential and the cause of my poor scholastic performace.
I am also glad that he is of that view as he will most definately change that with the UFS.