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A COLLEAGUE sought my advice for his nephew, who is not sure what to do after matric. I am a university lecturer in the humanities, but this was my response: "If the student is uncertain and the family will be paying for the fees, he should rather take a year doing a practical certificate such as bookkeeping. It is a cheaper, better investment for life than the R100,000 you might cough up for them to experiment with first year at university. Afterwards he can go ahead and do a degree."

My colleague agreed. Both of us are historians — all we ever do is talk about what surprises and delights we have uncovered in archives and in the course of research. But we are also black parents who are worried about how best to guide our children and our students under current economic and social conditions.

The debate about the "worth" of university degrees, and the value of the humanities and arts in particular, is now an old one. People typically argue quite strongly for one perspective — either that tertiary institutions should be focusing on the hard skills needed by the economy, or that we should appreciate the overall intellectual cultivation offered by a university education.

However, this is not an either/or issue. As educational social entrepreneur Fred Swaniker has argued, Africa needs a hybrid tertiary education model that can produce practically skilled graduates who also have a broad intellectual outlook on the questions facing humanity.

In other words, SA needs an education system that fuses aesthetic, philosophical and technical education for African children, where the spirit of the curriculum is not about technocratic matters, such as pass rates, but the intellectual capacities of the student who goes through the system.

In discussions about curriculum transformation, Rhodes University sociologist Babalwa Magoqwana has challenged us to define the attributes of the African graduate that would emerge from such an education model. The following definition has emerged from our conversations:

"An African graduate is a seeker of knowledge who is well-versed in the critical intellectual traditions of the African continent and diaspora, regardless of the discipline they are trained in. They are rigorous in disciplinary methods and contextually sensitive in their problem solving. They are multi-idiomatic in language usage and comfortable with multiple literary cultures. They are endogenously-rooted and globally adaptable in technological innovation."

If we are able to produce this range of hybrid "intelligences" in our graduates we might then start to feel at ease that our children have the social and practical capacities to navigate Africa and the world of the 21st-century global space.

These "intelligences" must both affirm for African graduates that they have a rich contribution to make to the world of human knowledge based on the lessons of our own history, and simultaneously give them the skills they need to be able to cross as many geographic and cultural borders as they wish in the pursuit of life.

I told a student activist: "There is little in our South African universities, in theory or in practice, that addresses black children as though they will inherit anything. We do not address you as though this infrastructure will be yours, that you must own and run this economy, that the political institutions are yours. Even our most radical theory cannot easily capture the sociological textures of what it means that you will inherit your grandfather’s cattle as a graduate."

To me it seems the relationship between today’s African graduates, their capabilities and their future, is incidental to the overall purpose of our education system. The education vision should be about how our graduates will navigate their future of 2030, not with the graduation and matriculation statistics of today.

Mkhize lectures in history at Rhodes University. This is her last regular column for Business Day.