CULTURE refers to: “The cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe as well as material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving.”
Culture is here presented as dynamic, but of course keeping constant ‘traditions’ that give it character over time.
Culture is manifested through shared habits, norms, values and attitudes.
A key characteristic of culture is ‘value consensus’ whose source is shared ideology (system of ideas about literally everything).
In its innocence, ideology is called ‘philosophy’; in our case, ‘African philosophy’.
Philosophy informs everything, including ‘technology’, the latter being a tangible vehicle of the heart’s desires, the desire for a life easy to satisfy; not the heart itself.
Value consensus is what determines quality in everything – it is the basis of all aesthetics, including ideas of what good education is (that which moulds the young and old into responsible and self-fulfilling citizens) – accountability dimension.
Culture transforms ‘human beings’ into ‘people’ (vanhu/abantu) that is, social beings and education is the key transformative driver.
Society is an ecosystem supported by several pillars/institutions that are responsible for ‘social reproduction’.
Society is the product of cultural values.
Instruments of socialisation include the family, religion, media and educational institutions; the latter being foster to all the earlier institutions with Quality Assurance (QA) as the ultimate protector of society’s values.
QA is therefore ideally accountable first to society before it answers to global expectations.
To this end, best practices have to come from society.
Logically, the first port of any curricular design begins with consultation with society (community, policy-makers and industry).
Societal needs are determined by their cultural values (culture being the source of philosophy). Curricular content derives from, and is guided and determined by, culture (knowledge, skills, values and attitudes).
Put simply; any content that militates against the people’s values is not fit for any purpose
In a nutshell, culture is the people, their philosophy and worldview.
What makes African people African is their shared worldview which informs their deep-seated spirituality; their bloodlines and how these relate to each other.
All their guiding philosophical notions of being and identity recognise the fact that at the centre of history is human agency; African agency.
This spirit is central to ‘hunhuism’, pan-Africanism, Afro-centricity and Africa-centredness. They all place the African at the centre.
The point, therefore, is to mainstream these not only in the curricula; but also in QA mechanisms.
The expected outcomes of a culture-driven QA system include, inter-alia; general peace and order, shared values of peace and stability and ‘charactered’ professionals such as African engineers, African soldiers, African lawyers, African pilot, among others.
These are professionals with distinct African personality, whose hallmark is moral probity.
All this begins with students imbued with an African character, attitude and values from the very onset of their educational and professional journeys.
They are all defined by an ‘African sensibility’ – ‘African consciousness’ deeper than the skin.
In a sense, we are saying Africa must know itself first and be itself before joining the rest of the world rather than disjointedly rush to the globe.
The purpose of this article is to present a brief overview of QA in higher education.
As the first chapter in a volume on QA, it not only presents the authors’ perspective on the subject, but also provides the reader with information on the views expressed by some authorities in the international community on this important aspect of higher education.
The intention is to help the reader have a clear understanding of the basic principles of QA, the reasons for the development of the enterprise, as well as an appreciation of what has been seen as its successes and failures.
This will help to contextualise QA in southern African countries such as Zimbabwe and put all the subsequent chapters of the book in their proper perspective.
But before examining quality as perceived in modern parlance, this article begins by providing the philosophical, ideological and cultural basis of quality premised on contextual relativity.
By their nature, all concepts are subject to contextual relativity.
In this case, the southern African regional cultural philosophy of unhu/ubuntu/botho will be the informing ideology to the discussion.
Indeed, culture provides space for the conceptualisation of literally anything and everything.
The importance of understanding quality as imbued in all aspects of human endeavour and it is the pre-occupation of this article.
This article introduces quality in terms of its tangible and intangible facets.
The article takes off with the intrinsic value of quality, its essential software elements as enshrined in the philosophy that informs it before moving on to outlining the development of the QA enterprise as understood in modern quality assurance parlance.
It explains in summary form, the purposes and methods of the enterprise.
The article then gives a brief account of the successes of the enterprise as well as the criticisms that have been levelled against it, before concluding with an explanation of the lessons that many of the countries of the SADC region can learn from the experience of the international community.
Since time immemorial, mankind has tried to make sense of the world, of the universe and of their place in the cosmos.
As a result, various ages have produced different thoughts about these, but the ultimate truth is yet to reveal itself.
This eternal quest for truth is the true subject of philosophy.
It is against this understanding that education and quality in education are premised.
In its broadest sense ‘education’ refers to any act or experience that has a formative/transformative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual.
In its technical sense, ‘education’ is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge (wisdom), skills and values from one generation to another.
It is the process of developing the knowledge, skills and character of the citizens of a community.
Central to any definition of education is its contribution to community self-preservation which is methodically designed in line with a certain shared view of the world; what is generally called worldview.
That is the plumb-line.
All human activities, including education and quality in education, are supposed to be moulded by this shared value-system.