What Knowledge Is Most Worth in Crisis Conditions?

• In Event: South African Teacher Education's Response to the Pandemic: A Critical Reflection!

Abstract

The novel coronavirus has jetted institutions of higher education into uncharted territory that required a rapid response due to its potential to exponentially affect peoples’ overall health, the economy and the social and economic challenges of the majority of people in South Africa and, indeed, across the globe. This paper takes a deep dive into curriculum matters spurred on by the superficial responses by educational institutions, including school education, that focuses primarily on curriculum coverage and saving the academic year. These superficial responses as an alternate to face-to-face teaching and learning during the lockdown period raised serious questions of what knowledge is most worth (Spencer, 1884) in the context of such crisis? Taking this curriculum stance, the paper is based on a desk-top review of guidelines and notices to staff of a selected number of institutions across Provinces of South Africa. In addition a desk-top review of proposals, commentaries and critiques presented or published through the media, including print-based media, internet based news and television broadcasting. The review revealed a pedantic focus on curriculum coverage of the planned curriculum and on teaching methodologies to facilitate off-campus and non-contact teaching and learning in order to safeguard the integrity of the planned academic year. Using Spencer’s (1884) fundamental curriculum question of what knowledge is most worth and whose knowledge is most worth, this paper then makes an argument that we, as academics, have been complicit in perpetuating an education that is far from just, mostly unresponsiveness to the needs of the majority of the population and a misalignment to an education for relevance. The paper concludes with some suggestions on teaching and on curriculum that focuses on education for relevance. For example, one of the suggestions made in the paper relates to the reviewing the core components of school education to include a focus on digital literacy, numeracy literacy, financial literacy, environmental literacy and communication literacy as core components of a curriculum to enable a learner to be responsive their personal, contextual and futuristic needs of a developing nation.
References
Spencer, H. 1884. What knowledge is of most worth? Michigan: University of Michigan.

Author

• Prevanand (Labby) Ramrathan, University of KwaZulu-Natal