Students should do service in communities to integrate cultural and social capital into their knowledge to fight global problems, writes Rajesh Tandon.
Pretoria - Humanity is facing several dilemmas. It has achieved unparalleled prosperity in the past 50 years, yet, one-fifth of all people live in poverty on less than $1.25 a day.
Amid plenty, there is entrenched poverty and scarcity – 40 percent of all children in the world are malnourished.
Rapid economic growth has led to growing environmental degradation, and, in some sense, greater disparities in countries and regions.
The benefits of economic growth are not evenly available to all citizens.
Growing disparities are also causing conflicts and tensions within countries.
Economic and technical resources are now available to address poverty, disease and malnutrition. Yet, Millennium Development Goals are nowhere near being achieved. There has been a widespread acceptance of democracy as a form of governance across the globe; yet, most citizens feel disaffected by the system of decision-making.
Citizens across the world now demand a voice in decision-making.
Amid all these dilemmas, the future of the global economy is a race towards knowledge economies. As the World Bank has announced, advanced economies are now knowledge economies.
There is growing commercialisation of knowledge, as a commodity, with intellectual property regimes to harvest financial benefits.
Knowledge production is becoming highly competitive with business, media, think tanks and civil society challenging the traditional hegemony of universities as the only recognised sites of knowledge production.
We have also entered a world where there are major power asymmetries in the knowledge enterprise.
Global soft power is being increasingly exercised through Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter; BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera shape views and minds of citizens around the world. Educational access inequities have resulted in large numbers of primary literates and very few who are professionally prepared.
The hegemony of the English language is destroying mother-tongues across the world. With languages, world-views also disappear. A homogenised, singular world is being constructed, unable to live with diversity.
In this context there is an urgent need to rebuild knowledge societies.
The diversity of knowledge forms, sources and modes have to be acknowledged and respected. Western medicine undermined local healing and herbal health practices a century ago. Today, Silicon Valley in California has the highest numbers of holistic healing and health centres in the world.
All human beings are capable of critical thinking. All attempt to make sense of their experiences, all carry memory chips of stored knowledge passed on from generations before. Some ignore it, others deny it, and some others may choose to rely on Wikipedia. But, tools for knowledge production are universally available to all humanity.
What has caused discrimination is the perpetuation of instrumental rationality as the only epistemology.
Yes, cognition and rational thinking is important. But, humans also know from acting and feeling.
Yet, learning by doing and feeling about the world (phenomenology of everyday life) have not been accepted as legitimate modes of knowing. This needs to change if knowledge democracy is to be established.
Universities can play an important role in promoting knowledge democracy. The core missions of a university are research, teaching and service. Research is about the production of new knowledge, while teaching is about disseminating new knowledge to students.
The primary function of universities is to enable students to learn new knowledge. In most universities, service is viewed separately from teaching; service is voluntary, and is meant to “help the poor communities” somehow.
It is high time universities integrate their three missions – that service is integrated into research and teaching.
Production of new knowledge and its learning by students is possible through engagement with communities that may even produce socially relevant knowledge, so the students’ learning is based on a deeper understanding of their contexts and a respect for knowledge in communities. This co-construction of knowledge may enhance the contributions of universities to knowledge democracy. Universities thus can provide intellectual resources to complement and build on the enormous cultural and social capital of communities.
Unesco recently exhorted universities to re-examine their research and teaching practices to “prepare the next generation of ethical global citizens”.
If such citizens have the capacity to work in the diverse and contested terrains of knowledge democracy, they may build the commitment to face those dilemmas humanity is confronted with.
Knowledge democracy can support reclaiming the voices of all, in pursuit of cognitive and social justice.
Many universities are encouraging “engaged scholarship” to deepen and broaden forces working towards knowledge democracy in the coming decades.
Pretoria News
* Dr Rajesh Tandon occupies the Unesco chair on community-based research and social responsibility in higher education at New Delhi in India. This is an edited version of his UCT vice-chancellor’s open lecture on Tuesday.
** The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of Independent Newspapers.