We never miss the water until the well runs dry

A student stands up during a journalism lecture and shouts above the noise, “I did not get up this early to come to this lecture and listen to trivial student issues”, only to be hotly shot down by another student confidently retorting, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that if you want to hear you must sit in the front”.This incident was immediately followed by a student attempting to use the distraction to leave the lecture hall early, only to trip and fall, which resulted in unnecessarily loud guffaws and over exaggerated doubling over. The logic behind this is to further waste the lecturers’ time because it took the lecturer a lengthy amount of time to get everyone under control. It takes so long because the lecturer adopts what is known as transactional analysis, which means that the lecturer refuses to shout at students because it makes them feel like children and they will respond as such. But I have to ask if this theory still applies when you are dealing with children in the first place. Or it may be a teacher who takes big chunks out of the lecture to put children in the “Sim Bin”, their version of the naughty stool, which is ineffective because students end up giggling and in their laughs the lesson is lost. Anyway, by the time the circus had come and left town, it was time for the lecture to end, with nothing covered except once again sending the youth forth into the world with empty skulls. One may put this incident down to a bad day, “It was probably a Monday or Thursday”, you might say, because that is when all the students pour straight out of the pub and into the lecture hall. But in fact the circus comes to town everyday now as student attitude slips nonchalantly down the toilet.

Everyday, in both lectures and tutorials, students are exercising their new found ability to take control of the situation and use it their lazy advantage. When discussing the collapse of self control and control in every aspect of academic life, the same reply is grunted out. That of students being the lost generation or a science experiment carried out by the education department, that went horribly wrong. Or it is because we are living in the postmodern age, where we struggle to deal with the deconstruction and reconstruction of what we thought was reality and cannot handle the multiple realities that we are bombarded with on a daily basis through the mass media and globalisation . To be fair we should give the students credit for embracing new technological advancements because they do spend long, hard hours looking through the Internet to find sights such as Echeat , which allows them to copy an already written essay on a set topic for a few dollars. We have become lost farts blowing in a vicious wind and so we do not know how to prioritise because we do not know what is truly important. I agree that these hypotheses need to be taken into consideration but the one thing that remains, is that our generation is addicted to an easy way out. A label is given to everything under which students hide to avoid facing up to the truth.

To conclude Professor Pityana mentioned in his lecture that he gave at Rhodes University on academic freedom, that university is the place that produces critically thinking individuals who challenge existing structures of influence and authority. Ironically and embarrassingly the very individuals he was talking too and about, rendered his words null and void through their embarrassingly racist and disruptive behaviour. What Sim Kyazze wrote in his blogpost, “Why are we even here? Pityana public lecture falls on quite a few 18 year olds “tin ears”” , asks the right question. Why are we here when we are just wasting everyone’s money and time? There are individuals who actually refuse to pass blame even though they perhaps have more right to do so and who just want someone to offer them the chance to show their selfless and committed attitude. The old proverb that says, “You never miss the water until the well runs dry”, rings true because students’ commitment to academics is running out quickly. How students will feel if they knew that they were responsible for the collapse of truth in our country because they were too busy focusing on the wine while the water ran out.