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 15 minutes 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. I have to ask if this theory still applies when you are dealing with children in the first place. Anyway, by the time the circus had come and left town, it was time for the lecture to end, with nothing covered and the only accomplishment was 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 have poured 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 lecture theatres and basically in every aspect of academic life, the same reply is grunted out, that we are the lost generation, a science experiment carried out by the education department, which went horribly wrong. Perhaps 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. We become lost farts blowing in a vicious wind and so we do not know what to be truly important. I agree that these hypotheses need to be taken into consideration but one thing that remains, is that our generation is addicted to an easy way out. A label is given to everything that students hide under to avoid facing up to the truth, which is that despite the fact that the sky is falling on our heads, we need to get on with it!

Another case in point is that of plagiarism. It is virtually impossible to forget about plagiarism because all of the introductory lectures drummed it into our heads. Although, if you were drinking and not attending introductory lectures, than I guess that excuses you from going onto site like E-cheats and copying prewritten essays straight off the site for a few dollars. This leads me to two points. Firstly, students having absolutely no idea about what they want to study. Many of us pursue the scent of money like a pack of bloodhounds and so study things that we hate. This translates into swallowing and puking out your course every weekend and during the week at the local pub. Secondly, is the issue of a certain percentage of students who have unlimited amount of cash at their disposal, enough to pay dollars for a badly written American essay and who have the mentality that mommy and daddy will always be shoving wads of money in their faces.

To conclude Prof. Pityana mentioned in his lecture 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 to 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””, poses 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. The old proverb that says that we do not miss the water until the well runs dry, rings true because if we continue to be so apathetic to all academic structures things are going to go down hill fast!