By Giles Gasper. In 1473, Alexander Hardynge, who had finished his bachelor’s degree at Oxford nearly two years previous, borrowed money through an educational loan service. The loan came with a one year repayment deadline.
With some of that money, he rented a room at Exeter College and offered tutoring services to college students. He soon repaid that loan. In 1475, Hardynge took out a second loan – again, in part to rent teaching space. More...

By Giles Gasper. As universities prepare for a new regime of regulation aimed at monitoring the quality of their teaching, they may find some comfort in the 900-year-old history of debates around autonomy, governance, who can award qualifications and even the relationships between students and their teachers. Who held power over universities and their pursuit of intellectual inquiry was hotly contested in the Middle Ages. Universities were beholden to popes and kings, but also, in some cases to students. More...

By Johan Fourie. There is a new call to arms at South African universities: it’s time to decolonise the economics curriculum. This is part of a broader project to make curricula across disciplines more applicable to the South African context. More...

By Emmanuel Mgqwashu. Education can and should change people’s lives. Education systems ought to operate with the public good in mind. But for many South Africans, this is not the case. I would suggest that part of the reason post-colonial and post-apartheid educational policies are not succeeding is because they are biased towards outcomes that are relevant only for and to urbanised contexts. They exclude rurality. More...

By Michael Rowe. Undergraduate physiotherapy students spend most of their time learning about the basic and clinical sciences. This has a certain pragmatic appeal, but a person is more than an assemblage of body parts. Our students learn anatomy and biomechanics – the idea of bodies as machines – and then explore what can be done to those bodies in order to “fix” them. More...

By Melanie Walker. Development, argues Indian economist Amartya Sen, is the expansion of people’s freedoms to lead lives that matter to them. Doing so might include being treated with dignity or ensuring that their children get a decent education. More...

By Christa van der Walt. Research has proved repeatedly that children undoubtedly achieve much better when they start schooling in a language linked to one they can already use quite well. Using a familiar language for schooling is a big part of such success, which is why the late South African educationalist Neville Alexander advocated for mother tongue based-bilingual education. More...

By Steve Graham. Students who recently took the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) scored lower when they took the test on a computer than when they used paper and pencil. More...