Partnerships in which teachers go to work and managers go to school can help ensure quality pre-tertiary education, says Brenda Gourley.
The health of a nation - economically, ethically and psychically - resides in its citizens' levels of education. Industries, communities, public enterprises as well as tertiary education thrive or falter according to the quality of primary and secondary educational output. Considerable anguish and inquiry, public debate and political campaigns attend unsatisfactory output.
"Output" is a crude term for the educational capacity and acumen we expect from students leaving schools. The issues are by no means clear in a world dominated by the interdependence of people in a global economy notable mainly for the gross inequalities among people.
How do you construct a curriculum, how do you teach, what do you teach and how do youngsters learn in such a world? Never before have the questions been more urgent.
Is it not odd, then, that universities do not ensure that their faculties or schools of education are focal points of their strategic objectives? After all, do we not define ourselves by what we do rather than what we say? What is tertiary education, as a sector, doing to answer the questions posed?
This summer in Trondheim, Norway, a group gathered to tell the stories of what they are doing to improve the quality of pre-tertiary education. Mostly teachers, business people and community leaders, they are not waiting for somebody else to change the course and nature of education. They are rewriting the text themselves.
They met under the auspices of the International Partnership Network. The warp of the conference was school development. Through this was interwoven with different threads, including the place of communities, quality of life, technology, engineering and lifelong learning in building and sustaining partnerships.
The work fostered by the IPN ought to be built into standard practice. No faculties of education or colleges of further education should remain untouched by this development.
We heard about schools where "entrepreneurship" is an educational goal and children are encouraged to start businesses of their own - and they do.
An important part of the new practice emerging is governed by an old African proverb: it takes a whole village to raise a child. School authorities who involve all of the community with business and parents in running schools and setting agendas are finding not only a warm response but startling improvements in children's behaviour and results.
Teachers need to have their sights changed. In South Africa, for example, most teachers go to rural schools and then to teacher training colleges, often in rural settings. After that, they are posted back to rural schools.
What possible conception can they have of "business" and what it expects of the students in the future?
We have an Institute of Partnerships between Education and Business. It provides opportunities for teachers to spend the months when school is in recess with a business working on specific projects.
Through this, they learn about business processes. They are encouraged to integrate their experience into the courses they teach when they return to their school.
For their part, the business is persuaded to take an interest in the management of the school from which it has "adopted" a teacher. What the managers learn is that teachers are lamentably ill-trained to run "businesslike" schools and that business input is crucial if schools are ever to reap the outputs expected of them.
There is a wealth of creativity among teachers in the field, as demonstrated by the projects they undertake on environmental issues, mentoring, improving the position of women and disadvantaged groups, using technology, anticipating workplace needs and a host of other topics.
We need to be sure that the best practices by the best teachers are written up, evaluated and passed on to a new generation of school teachers, who understand that the world has to change in a very fundamental way if any kind of social justice is to prevail. Where better to begin than in the classroom?
Our present system of education is not confronting the most pressing problems facing the planet and its peoples in the next few crucial decades.
The relationships described at the IPN conference led to the inevitable conclusion that partnerships are vital: they have the ability to harness a wide range of resources and to employ creative, local ways to address difficult social and economic problems.
Looking through the list of participants at the conference, I was alarmed at how few people there were from universities and further education.
The University of Warwick deserves special mention as one of the main architects of this concept. There were other exceptions of course - but not enough.
I hope that changes fast. The IPN and the South African Learning and Development Partnership Network will host next year's conference in KwaZulu Natal - a province so diverse in its people and complex in its needs that it will be a most appropriate setting for developing holistic educational approaches.
I commend to you the IPN website and hope that as many people as possible will throw their weight behind an important movement in the world of pre-tertiary education. It affects us all.
Brenda Gourley is vice-chancellor of the University of Natal at Durban.
The IPN web site can be found at: http://www.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ipn/index.html