Chapter Summary
2.1 Training for South African Practice: The Magnetic Power of True North
2.1.3 True North and the South African University System
Pierre de V. Pienaar, an Afrikaans speaking linguist, is termed the 'Father' of Speech Therapy in South Africa (Aron, 1991). In 1936, at the English-medium University of the Witwatersrand, he successfully motivated for the opening of a speech clinic, and also the establishment of a two year training in Logopaedics. By 1946, this had become the currently structured four year, honours equivalent degree of Speech Pathology and Audiology. The extension of the degree into both its professional status and into four other South African universities has been documented by Aron (1991) and Pillay (1997). The focus of this discussion is not on the profession's historical milestones, but on the ideas and beliefs which have, when combined with those underlying its imported knowledge base, contributed to the current model of professional development.
There are two important contextual sources that have significance to this model, namely the South African' university system, and the socio-political context of apartheid.
Operating together, it will be suggested that they provided the conditions for the gaze of professional knowledge to become frozen upon the North, and at the 'same time implicitly support a training model of structural racism. As its establishment pre-dates the introduction of formal apartheid legislation by two generations, the South African university system is the first to be discussed.
The idea of a Northern University: Its place in the Sun of the South.
The South African university system was established in 1873. Modelled on the "lines of the University of London as it then existed" (Metrowich, 1929; p 12), the University of the Cape of Good Hope was the first examining university in the Country. It set the standard of qualification that gave its degrees, from 1877, "equal rank, precedence and consideration" as those in the United Kingdom (Metrowich, 1929; p13). The remainder
of the South African university system derived from the examining standards of this institution.
The importance of this is that the South African university system inherited more from late nineteenth century England than its own knowledge base. As the previous section has pointed out, knowledge itself is intimately related to the prevailing ideas and beliefs of the times. As these historical ideas have direct relevance to' the context of Speech and Hearing as a vocational discipline located within the South African university system, they have need of being highlighted here.
That professional (vocational) education occurs within a university system can be seen as the uneasy result of two distinct strands of belief about what the aim of university education actually is. Since the beginning of Western civilisation, the debate has provided for a separation of belief, and an area of contestation (Allen, 1988; Jaroslav,
1992).
Broadly, the division of belief concerns whether university education should serve the society it operates within, or whether that it should serve the development of the individual mind in a disinterested quest for 'Truth'. On the one hand is the:
" ... monastic, other-worldly [liberal tradition], devoted to learning as an end in itself and indifferent to the profane comforts of the world. The other is secular, worldly, seeking knowledge instrumentally for the purposes of personal or collective mastery over the world, and finding the university experience an appropriate introduction to the social circle in which the student expects to spend his life after his period of in statu pupillari"
(Halsey, 1977; p23).
Both points of view have historically found their supporters. Yet what has currently become known as the liberal/utilitarian debate sharpened considerably in Europe's nineteenth century as the utilitarian (vocational) camp gained support from society's need for technically exploitable knowledge and with it, an aspiration on behalf of the emergent
middle-cl~ss
for university education and professional status (Allen, 1988;Jaroslav, 1992).
An uneasy tmce between these points of view has been more recently proposed by the German scholar, Karl Jaspers (1965), who provided what Jaroslav (1992) and Allen (1988), suggest as a 'societally-sensitive' idea of the university. He conceptualised it as, at one and the same time, a school for the professions, a cultural centre, and a research institute. In addition, however, he placed emphasis on the development of the whole man [mensch] within a community of scholars and students seeking tmth.
The liberaVutilitarian debate has had a significant effect upon the South African model of professional development for Speech and Hearing therapy, particularly 10
legitimating the method it has adopted to seek out the discipline's 'truth'.
The nineteenth and early twentieth road to truth, and as already emphasised in 2.1.2, was to be found in the application of particular principles and ideas. Knowledge and its expansion was to be based upon rational analysis and disciplined observation of the scholarly discipline itself. The method of European and American universities of the time was 'objective', 'replicable' and ostensibly. 'neutral' (Allen, 1988). Emergent disciplines such as Speech and Hearing Therapy, seeking the status of university training had,theref~re, to develop their knowledge on a scientific basis.
At the same time, however, this approach to knowledge generation was not without significant benefit to the academics and institutions concerned. By citing 'truth' as the result of the empirical-analytical tradition, nineteenth century academics were able to ward off criticism from society as to their intellectual activities. Tied to the prevailing liberal belief in the rights of the individual, institutions were able to negotiate the rights to academic freedom and ensure legislated autonomy for universities.
University autonomy, or the "freedom to teach, to do research and to publish in accordance with one's scientific and scholarly convictions, with the understanding that these convictions conform with prevailing criteria of scholarly and scientific truth"
(Shils, 1977; P17: Emphasis mine), results in academics remaining masters in their own house. While the idea of community and contextual responsibility has been significantly challenged by society itself in the Europe and America of the past century, it is Shils' (1977) interpretation of the functions of autonomy that is important in discussing the
South African discipline's model of professional development. Firstly, it is important in questioning its effect on the knowledge transmission and production process of an autonomous professional training programme, contained within an autonomous institutional framework - when both develop within a socio-political context of separate development. Secondly, it is important in examining how this layering of autonomy can serve to protect the 'knowledge base itself from change, even in the transformed socio- political context of the Country.
The following section expands upon this theme, linking the historic independence of professional decision-making to a current situation of structural racism in its knowledge production and transmission processes. In other words, it suggests that the several layers of institutionalised autonomy have served to uncritically maintain its knowledge sources, resulting in an orientation towards interpreting the needs of only a certain part of South African society.
2.1.4 True North and the Hidden South: The Unwavering Compass