for Mmegi (Gaborone local weekly)

Excellence, Education, Economics:

Communication is the Key

Robert de Beaugrande

For over ten years now, a lively controversy has been underway about 'excellence in education' in countries like Britain and the United States. Ordinary citizens might see nothing to argue about. Has not achieving excellence always been the major goal of educating people, and does not education continually test and measure excellence (or the lack of it)?

The controversy is evidently about two competing definitions of 'excellence'. On one side, achieving excellence in education would mean becoming well-rounded and knowledgeable about general issues in the sciences and the arts, including the classics of European literature. On the other side, achieving excellence would mean becoming highly specialised in a field at the forefront of technology and industry. The two sides seem to draw further apart when specialisation is accelerating and the competition for well-paid jobs increases. During the Thatcher period, the British government unabashedly pressured higher education to phase out its traditions of breadth and humanism in favour of adapting to the demands of industry. The upgrading of the polytechnics into universities and the withdrawal of financial support from the old universities were no doubt intended to send just such a message. But cannot education produce creative people who would be both well-rounded and at the forefront? I shall come back to creativity later on.

What tends to go unmentioned in the controversy are the consequences for those who do not achieve excellence. They will consigned to low-paying jobs or outright unemployment, and recent reports on world-wide economic trends indicate that the proportion of the population being consigned this way is rapidly increasing, while the proportion who achieve excellence is shrinking. However you define excellence, it is clearly getting harder to achieve.

Of course nobody would argue against the need for excellence at a time when everyone is, or soon will be, competing in a world-wide market and an international economy. But just such a time demands that we conscientiously assess which requirements genuinely support the development of excellence in response to a new situation, and whether our institutions such as education fulfil them.

The economic requirements are easily measured and clearly met in Botswana: democracy, stability, and prosperity; an expanding economy, a favourable balance of trade, and a strong currency.

But the educational requirements are not so easy to measure, as we can see from the controversy itself. Throughout its history, education has tended to change more slowly than the society. In Britain, generations of schoolchildren learned Latin, long after it had ceased to be the language of high culture and administration. Today, British children still labour away at the mechanics of arithmetic that were once laboriously done on paper but are now effortlessly done on inexpensive pocket calculators.

At this stage in history, simple economics makes the slowness of change in education frankly unaffordable. Pupils at schools like Maru-a-Pula and at the University of Botswana must be given full opportunities to gain acceptance on internationally accredited levels of excellence. Notable successes have been achieved, as demonstrated by the recent establishment of the Centre for Physics. The founding of an independent Faculty of Business is another praiseworthy landmark.

But in view of the challenges ahead, we cannot allow ourselves to be complacent. The key step toward real leadership is excellence will be to modernise communication, and doing so will require co-operation on all levels, from the detailed organisation of schools and the training of teachers up to the panoramic outreach of the national development plans, of which we are now looking forward to seeing the final text of number 8.

Let me explain what is at stake. Communication is the majors means for young people to get socialised into the roles in the family and the community and to get educated for their future careers. And when young people encounter problems or even failures in their socialisation and education, these are most often due to breakdowns in communication and not to the lack of diligence or intelligence so often blamed on the individual. Since communication is a joint activity of all participants, blaming the isolated individual is unfair and undemocratic.

Yet astonishingly little deliberate attention has been devoted to enhancing communication in ordinary life or even in higher education. Most of the time, information gets presented in some standard medium, such as instruction manuals, textbooks, or lectures, and the learners are left to their own devices to see how they can understand, remember, and make use of the information. When educational knowledge is presented and tested in separate lessons containing isolated facts and figures, human brain-power gets put to dreadfully strenuous and inefficient use, and creativity is virtually excluded.

The situation is aggravated by the educational routines of posing isolated questions, each with a single right answer that has to be memorised and recited with no changes. There, creative uses of new knowledge to enhance previous knowledge are downright harmful because you might not be able to pick out the exact bit that you are expected to recite. Yet isolating bits of knowledge makes them much harder to remember, and you are caught in a double-bind!

Extensive research on learning and memory has established that people can acquire and use new knowledge only by fitting it into what they already know. The most effective method to understand something and to determine when you have understood is to communicate about what it means, how you can use it, and so on. So to modernise education, we need to treat information and knowledge as the raw materials for creative communication. Instead of just learning mathematics or learning history, young people would be learning to communicate with confidence and self-reliance about mathematics and history in way that can make new knowledge out of current knowledge.

The greatest step toward excellence in education would therefore be to design a curriculum centred on creative communication. The language curriculum on the primary and secondary levels would be chiefly a forum to train and develop communicative strategies for dealing resourcefully with issues and problems both in schooling and in community life. Teachers would act as experts and consultants on communication and not just as fault-finders watching out for fine points and errors in grammar and usage. Grammar and usage should not be neglected or dropped, but treated as guidelines for active and creative communication, instead of as empty mechanical exercises in obeying rules. This project too we are currently pursuing in my department.

On the university level, excellence could be actively promoted by training effective and creative communicative strategies in each field: communicating about business, communicating about physics, communicating about computer science, and so on, would become accepted courses and tracks within the curriculum. We would then finally be able to prevent or resolve the potential breakdowns in communication that have been responsible for preventing so many learners from achieving excellence. And we would be deploying open communication in the name of fairness and democracy.

Take business communication for example. Good jobs in business increasingly demand skills in communication, especially in those branches of business where information itself is a valued commodity. Yet recent international surveys by prominent firms like Arthur Andersen Consultants report that many schools and universities around the world have no business communication programmes, and those that do are often not oriented toward the changing realities of modern business. Also, hardly any universities were found with graduate programmes to grant higher degrees in business communication to people who would then be qualified to provide suitable training to prospective business personnel.

Surely the founding of our Faculty of Business would be a richly opportune occasion for the University of Botswana to reach out for excellence in an area where there is great demand and small supply. I have conferred on this matter with Dr. Ndzinge, the Dean of the Faculty, who heartily agreed. But some major requirements remain to yet secured. One requirement would a concerted willingness among the relative advisory and administrative bodies to approve the changes needed to lay the groundwork for new interdisciplinary projects among language departments such as English, the Faculty of Education, and the respective subject-area faculties or departments such as Business and Computer Science.

Another requirement would be modern, effective learning materials. Most of the few textbooks on Business English available here were published at least 10 to 15 years ago in Britain. The samples they offer are mostly invented. The advice they give about usage is prissy and old-fashioned; one book on the reading list tells you not to use any of these: real problem, major disaster, in connection with, with reference to, enclosed please find, under separate cover. And some assignments are so culturally insensitive in Botswana that you have to see them to believe them: write an essay on when father papered the parlour; write an essay about a walk along the seashore; write a paragraph supporting or opposing the proposition that girls employ their leisure more profitably than boys; write an essay with the title 'a woman’s place is in the home'.

You may understand why I and my colleagues are now developing new materials on our own. We are gathering realistic samples from the business textbooks being used in the business courses, such as accounting, and from business news in source like Mmegi and Business Day. We are highlighting the current issues we find there, such as international investment, restructuring, privatisation, and the trends of the Botswana Stock Exchange.

We are attempting to provide skills not just for using business English but also improving it. Consider this business information item entitled 'Managing stock' (from Mmegi):

Stock control is a very important activity for any business owner, especially if you are engaged in manufacturing, wholesaling, and retailing. If goods are not properly supervised, profits will disappear. Stock control records also provide you with vital information on what is selling well and what is not. The purpose of a stock control system is to tell you exactly what stocks are being held, their value, the source of supply and what items are on order from customers.

The writer addresses 'you' in user-friendly simple language as a presumed 'business owner'. Yet the term 'stock' is used as if it were the same as 'goods' and 'items', whereas what is meant is, in business language, stock-in-trade. Also, the terms 'Managing', 'controlling', and 'supervising' are loosely used as if they were the same thing; and the list of what the system 'tells' you is not parallel. These minor problems could be resolved by a revision like this:

Business owners engaged in manufacturing, wholesaling, and retailing should realise the importance of stock control in maintaining profits. A system of stock control records provide vital information on what is selling well and what is not; what stocks are being held; what their value is; where the sources of supply are located; and what items are on order from customers.

We need students who can command such detailed language skills that the standards of business English are not just maintained, but cultivated.

At this stage, we would heartily welcome input from members of the Botswana business community about the communicative skills they would like see among our graduates, and we would be delighted receive authentic samples of the modes of communication they are currently using.

Robert de Beaugrande has recently taken up a senior post as Professor of English at the University of Botswana. He has given lectures and workshops at 125 universities and academies of science in 40 countries, and published 21 books and 150 papers in 17 languages dealing with issues of language, education, society, science, and technology.