Why SA’s Catholic university is a tertiary option

BY FR MICHAEL VAN HEERDEN – In the community of South African universities, St Augustine College, the Catholic university in Johannesburg, is quite unique. Dr Van Heerden explains St Augustine College’s philosophy.

St Augustine College in Victory Park, Johannesburg

Cardinal John Henry Newman wrote in his book The Idea of a University that the true task of any university was to create a culture of education. A culture is that which gives form to the behaviour, interaction and values of any group, and a good culture would be one that forms a group in such a way that their true potential as human beings can emerge.

But, how does one create this educational culture on a tertiary level? In universities around the globe there seem to be two distinct approaches: what might be called ‘massification’ and ‘classicalism’.

Massification considers that, as educators, one has only to impart specialised knowledge to a group of students.

In this large group, the students struggle on their own to assimilate and understand how what has been imparted creates the culture of learning. This conveyer-belt image of education seems to have slipped into our thinking and practice some time during the industrial revolution.

The classical approach traces its origins back to the ancient world.

The Greek philosophers saw education as a type of anamnesis – an awakening of a dormant potential, already given in our human nature and present in all cultures even if it is sometimes obscured by other cultural imperatives.

Plato said that for this awakening to occur three things were imperative.

Firstly, on both the side of the student and educator, there must be a genuine love and search for the truth. Secondly, a living dialogue is needed between educator and student which leads to the third element of synousia – a community of fellowship between student and educator and between the educators themselves.

Taken together, these three elements characterise the distinctive contribution, I believe, that St Augustine College, South Africa’s Catholic university, should give to the culture of tertiary education within South Africa.

Cardinal Désiré Joseph Mercier, a friend of Cardinal Newman, defined truth as that which enables people to think themselves, and think themselves evermore clearly.

St Augustine, many centuries before, had spoken of the gaudium de veritate, the joy of searching for, discovering and communicating truth in every field of knowledge.

No one will dispute that the human person is a complex creature, one who has many attributes held together by something intangible-something the philosopher Immanuel Kant called a transcendental unity of apperception, or, in older parlance, a soul.

There is a tendency today to restrict higher education only to the study of what is tangible or scientific.

This approach to education splits the human person and, because it ignores the core of unity of the person, can only lead to an incomplete understanding of what it is to be truly human.

People are, then, left at sea in their quest for meaning and for direction. They are unable to bring together all the aspects of their lives, all their various attributes and activities, into a meaningful whole.

Pope John Paul II’s 1990 apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae has become the magna charta of a Catholic University. In paragraph 7, the Holy Father wrote:

Scientific and technological discoveries create an enormous economic and industrial growth, but they inescapably require the correspondingly necessary search for meaning in order to guarantee that the new discoveries be used for the authentic good of individuals and of human society as a whole.

If it is the responsibility of every university to search for such meaning, a Catholic university is called in a particular way to respond to this need: Its Christian inspiration enables it to include the moral, spiritual and religious dimension in its research, and to evaluate the attainments of science and technology in the perspective of the totality of the human person.

A lot these days has been written on the pedagogy that should characterise a tertiary institute of education. Given that students in South Africa come from a variety of cultural and economic realities, many are alienated by the structure and culture of learning at the academic institution.

Some inclusive strategies to address this problem give attention to specific remedial defects and/or learning strategies. While these strategies are important, where they fall short is in the fact that they do not address the lived realities of the students’one may say their culture and personal histories and perspectives.

To do this, lecturers must have a real respect and understanding for the life experiences of the students, so as to consciously mediate the learning of the student who is in front of them.

There are two ongoing moments in the dialectic. First, the educator must establish the trust and openness of the learner and the willingness on the learner’s part to disclose their perspectives. It is the business of the educator, by sympathetic comparison and criticism, to elicit these contributions and to make the best that can be made of them.

But how is the best use made of the learner’s perspectives? This is the second moment of dialectic.

In his dialogue Cratylus, Plato likens the second moment to the skill of weaving one could say weaving a living discourse. As the weaver has to separate the strands with the rod in order to weave the coloured thread through, so too must the educator separate the valuable from the limited in the learner’s perspectives.

In any culture there are enabling elements and disenabling elements. Building on the valuable or the enabling element within the student’s own cultural perspective, the educator weaves his knowledge and experience through by careful steps of explanation and discussion which bring the learner to a more exact understanding of the reality being examined.

The oldest meaning of the noun ‘university’ is that of a community of scholars creating a centre of excellence to uplift the common good.

In South Africa, with its challenges of limited resources especially in the areas of funding, of training and expertise cooperation between the disciplines is essential.

In an age of specialisation there is a temptation to work alone. However, when there is a genuine community of enquirers, then knowledge can be generated that serves the whole human person.

This is precisely why a private Catholic university does not see itself in competition with the large state universities. Rather, we see ourselves as complementing these institutions and belonging to the broader community of enquiry that exists between all who are engaged by the service of educating.

While respecting that the methods proper to each discipline must be preserved and enhanced, we see our distinctive contribution as a Catholic university in helping to facilitate the process where, as Pope John Paul wrote in Ex Corde Ecclesiae, various disciplines are brought into dialogue for their mutual enrichment (15).

This mutual enrichment, then, becomes the foundation upon which a higher synthesis of knowledge can be reached one in which, in the words of the pope, alone lies the possibility of satisfying that search for the truth which is profoundly inscribed on the heart of the human person (16).

Fr Michael van Heerden is the president of Saint Augustine College. Visit www.staugustine.ac.za