Bruce, as I hint at in reply #5, it's not obvious to me that the education system needs to change in response to this issue. While my experiences in lecturing from the past 16 years have given me reason to believe that the nature of students has changed, and caused me to adapt how I teach, it has not necessitated too much change in content, and has a complex relationship to content delivery.
To be more clear: In terms of style and pedagogical approach, students respond more to visual stimuli than before. So while I used to be able to walk around the lecture hall, simply talking, now they appear to "need" PowerPoint presentations to stay focused. They also respond well to video clips illustrating the themes of a lecture. So here we see the impact of them being products of a digital society. However, it's still often the case that I can keep them interested in a long, quite abstract talk, without any of those visual aids. So they haven't so much lost the ability to engage with words, as much as lost the ability/desire to discipline themselves, and direct their attention.
The primary problem we have in SA (besides the obvious ones around resourcing schools) is OBE. Education is not about defined outcomes. It's about developing a worldview, and a relationship to evidence/data, which allows you to separate quality content from bunk. So before we try to turn out a worker bee, we need to focus on intellectual attributes. Once those are in place, you can choose to apply your intellectual abilities to whatever field is attractive to you. So I'm talking about focusing on critical thinking, close reading, composition and those sorts of traditional humanities skills. Without those, you're crippled intellectually, no matter how good a stockbroker, lawyer, politician you are.
So what needs to change is to get the focus back to basics. It's not going to happen, though, because of political expediency on the part of government. As a mostly 3rd-world country, we're in a race with other developing nations to provide the technical labour force for global markets. We also want to fix unemployment problems, and the approach taken has been to try to quickly and massively upskill people so that they can participate in those markets. That's fine to an extent, as not everyone needs or wants a tertiary education. But for those who do want it, they get to university and don't have the basic skills they need.
The obvious consequence? We fail plenty of them, or we lower our standards. But guess what: university funding is based on throughput, so failing them (and maintaining standards) is not really an option. Plus, there's the political nightmare of educational discrimination along race lines, meaning that a large proportion of those you fail are black, which looks bad, and gets a different sort of heat from government.
Lastly, the future nightmare that is being set up is a country with a large workforce, who all have technical skills, but with very few people left who can play the roles of visionaries or leaders, due to the fact that education has become this pragmatic thing.
My solution would be to pour lots of money into the technical schools and technicons, which is where the majority of people would choose to go (more jobs, lower fees for education, more international mobility). Leave universities to be what they were designed to be: elitist institutions. Plus, of course, to scrap OBE.
