Welcome to the age of crowd-education

By GEORGE GATHIGI

The other day, a full-page advertisement by a local university caught my eye. The advert spoke of the institution as a brand; how the institution “goes the extra mile to build the brand”; that “the brand sells the product” and “the product defines the brand”.

Welcome to the new language of higher education in Kenya, which is, literally, the language of business. The higher learning environment has become competitive, not just in the traditional way of providing quality as they transform the society, but also in attracting students. But to what extent are universities in Kenya transforming society? What kind of transformation are they driving?

Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells notes that universities have primarily played four major functions. One, universities are major ideological apparatuses. They express ideological struggles that are present in all societies. Secondly, universities are a mechanism for selection and socialisation of the dominant elites, shaping individuals who eventually become leaders in their respective societies.

Thirdly, universities generate knowledge, a function often viewed as the most important. This is realised through specialised national institutes, in university research centres or in-house laboratories of private firms. Fourth and the most traditional function and most frequently emphasised, is training of a skilled labour force.

Universities are also subject to pressures from the society, which in turn generate contradictions in their roles. In the end, the character of higher education is determined by the way these contradictions are handled. One of the main contradictions in higher education in Kenya today is that universities are increasingly being transformed into enterprises.

This is evident in pro-business tendencies and adoption of business language. This is the language that Henry Giroux, a leading proponent of critical pedagogy warns about in education system. In critiquing the problems of neo-liberalism in the American system, Giroux views education as a site of democracy, activism, and social change, where students are supposed to be introduced to a diversity of intellectual ideas. Yet the marketplace is increasingly becoming the driver of higher education. Whereas universities have a role to train manpower, the fact that they are working more to fit a stencil made by the market place raises questions.

Such education ends up being guided by an instrumentalist approach and the universities merely obey the inexorable laws of the marketplace. Knowledge is viewed as a mere means towards a practical end or satisfaction of practical needs.

Some observers have lamented the commoditisation of the student as part of production process, not necessarily distinguishable from consumables from a factory.  The customer-student view is gaining traction. In some institutions, instructors are told in clear terms that the customer cannot be wrong–that students cannot fail.

In other cases, some students expect instructors to reward them with grades for participating in the learning transaction, having paid their consideration in the form of school fees.

Instructors are becoming disoriented with a system where the enterprise only views them as labourers churning out goods.

The marketplace is also visible in shaping the nature of knowledge packaging as new areas of study and courses revolve around marketability.

We are increasingly witnessing courses that are supposed to fit the ‘market demand’.

If the new information technologies have given birth to concepts such as crowd-sourcing,  ‘crowd-education’ is alive in some well-known programs.

Dr Gathigi teaches at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Nairobi