Since science and information on its own cannot prepare students for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, institutions must make certain that students are equipped with human and social sciences perspectives to embrace the fluctuations that this era brings with it for supreme human benefit.
This was one of the key things that were deliberated by different speakers at the Africa University Forum 2019, Universities Powering Africa’s Renaissance for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, recently held in Johannesburg.
Humanities subjects are the arts that offer students critical thinking, debating and problem-solving skills required to discover the complex human-to-robotic relations that we are already facing in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Several academics debated whether universities should take on a stronger interdisciplinary method to equip students for what lies ahead and whether, at a time when machines are rapidly learning. As a result, how can art and humanities facilitate us to better understand the use and effect of developing technologies?
Dr Nhlanhla Thwala, who is an academic director at Pearson Institute of Higher Education, also partook in the panel discussion and argued that humanities can never be observed as the study of the existed human experience.”Human beings live and interact with various phenomena and form reactions. Technology is just one of those phenomena that we have to deal with and have been dealing with during each of the preceding industrial revolutions,” he said.
The academic director also added, “The issue is very simple, have Africans extracted value from all the previous industrial revolutions? The answer is, yes.”
However, Thwala also indicated that one of the biggest shortcomings in the field of arts and humanities is that the study of its elements has traditionally been retrospective and focused on esoteric concerns of academics and specialists in the respective fields.
“We study humanities, we see what society has created, but we struggle to see what lies ahead. It’s difficult because our methods are empirical. We look at the past and we struggle with projecting what is going to happen. I have not seen a single study in humanities that predicted what was going to happen in the next epoch. Things evolve and we wake up after the fact and then we study them. That is one of the major problems in the academy,” Thwala pointed out.
In terms of reforming the curriculum to equip students for the future, Thwala stated that there is the issue of practically defining what is meant by the Fourth Industrial Revolution in relation to humanities.”We need to wake up to the fact that somewhere along the line we’ll need to be in front of technological developments, not behind them. That may require us to study the field, as opposed to sitting on the humanities side only as commentators.”
Thwala additionally said that it is vital for universities to ask themselves whether they are still relevant in two important ways. First, there is relevance in terms of the academic offerings as noted above the humanities. Secondly, there is relevance in terms of reaching the widest possible students who need a university education. Africa’s young population is already showing signs of unprecedented demand for university education that existing universities and modes of teaching-learning delivery cannot fulfil.
“The question this raises is this: Can we solve the problem by more bricks-and-mortar university infrastructure? Or can we use emerging technologies in education to address the problem while mitigating the already known drawbacks of distance and virtual learning?”
