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...and not thinkingWhen I lectured Hospitality Industry Law to students, I was surprised that hotel guests stripping during thunderstorms and hotel owners getting back rubs formed part of the curriculum.
Only as I came to understand how my students thought – or did not think – could I see where they had learnt about these darker aspects of life in the hospitality trade.
A student’s statement in an assignment: “It can be dangerous when there is no lightning between shay leys (sic) and guest strips” was merely the somewhat reworded textbook example of: “It can be dangerous when there is no lighting between chalets, and guests trip.”
Similarly, a person will be denied a liquor licence when he or she has been “back-rub”. Another word, according to this student, for “insolvent”.
As the year wore on, I despaired for my students. I thought incessantly about the causes for these low levels of literacy.
Is it the fact they were denied an education under apartheid, I asked myself? Yet, the majority of my students began high school around a decade after the transition to democracy in 1994.
Is it the fact they are learning in a second or third language, I wondered?
Speaking four languages myself, I am very aware of the difficulties of expressing oneself coherently outside of one’s mother tongue. I have announced myself to be pregnant after a meal in France, instead of full. I have told puzzled French tourists about the need to wear helmets to the beach in South Africa because the sun is very harsh. I meant to say “caps”. Really, I know all too well how easy it is to muddle up words that sound the same, like the student who wrote that “the man disgust the matter with his attorney”.
I learnt to overlook the non-existent grammar, the SMS language that students are more familiar with these days (“if u r found guilty”) and the unintentionally funny: “You cannot smoke in a car with under 12 children.”
I focused on whether the student had grasped the essence of what I was trying to teach. I could see past the errors that were indicators of a poor education system, without blaming the students. But I could not overlook the errors that were indicators of an inability to think. I expected, and I continue to expect, that having gained entrance to university and having spent three years in tertiary education, a student should demonstrate basic powers of deduction, notwithstanding the poverty of their schooling.
Three of my students in their fourth year did a small survey on sexual harassment in the hotel industry, in which they asked 20 hotel employees: “Have you, or has someone you know, been sexually harassed in a hotel?”
The survey revealed that one of the employees had been involved in an incident of which most of her co-workers had knowledge. As a result of the way the question was phrased, 15 of the 20 respondents said “yes” to the question.
My students told me confidently that 75% of the staff at this hotel had been sexually harassed; they drew me a pie chart to demonstrate.
Was I wrong in being disappointed? Was I expecting proficiency in quantitative analysis? Or was I expecting one of those three students to look at the survey and results, and say: “Hold on, maybe we’re not asking the right question”?
When the pass rate for my class was lower than for other classes, I was told I was “expecting the students to think like lawyers”. I was not; I was simply expecting them to think.
Somewhere along the line, we have stopped teaching students how to think. We expect them to remember stuff, but that is quite different from thinking about things. South Africa has forgotten what the point of education is, particularly tertiary education. We have forgotten that the content is often irrelevant – it is the ability to reason and think in abstract terms that matters.
I was taught, to some extent at school but mostly at university, how to think. Only now can I see the enormous value of growing up in a family in which we were expected, even as children, to have thoughts worth sharing. My ability to think was nurtured and developed – children need this, students need this. We have to value our future generations’ capacity to think.
Nancy Kline’s book Time To Think centres on how to create environments that encourage people to think because, as she puts it: “The quality of everything human beings do depends on the thinking we do first.”
Quite simply, we cannot afford not to think. We cannot afford to have any South African tertiary institutions not placing the highest value on critical thinking. Schools may teach too much by rote, companies may focus on profits instead of the free flow of ideas, but universities should unquestionably be focused on generating students’ ability to think.
Amanda Boardman
