Thought Leader

Dr Gloria Marsay People faced with adversities in developing countries struggle to bridge the gap between education and work. A key challenge for 21st century schools involves serving culturally diverse students with appropriate transferable skill domains, i.e. deep human skills and advanced technical skills essential for economic empowerment in the Fourth Industrial Revolution (#4IR), as described…

This morning my eye caught a report about Brazil’s climate-change denialist, neoconservative president, Jair Bolsonaro — evidently in an attempt to divert attention from his own egregious responsibility for the fires that rage unabated in (what is rapidly ceasing to be) the Amazon rainforest — accusing Leonardo DiCaprio of ‘paying’ non-governmental organisations to set fire…

It was with a heavy heart that I read the news, first, of Herman Mashaba’s resignation from the position of mayor of Johannesburg and from the Democratic Alliance (DA), and soon afterwards of that of both Mmusi Maimane (leader) and Athol Trollip (chairman) from their respective leadership positions in the DA, and from the party…

In a recent article titled ‘The perils of short-termism: Civilisation’s greatest threat’, by Richard Fisher, he makes the following sober (and sobering) remark about the people — our children and grandchildren — who are likely to be alive when the iconic year, 2100, dawns: All the decisions we make, for better and worse, will be…

By the day I am more and more astonished that the ANC — with a leader whom I used to regard as an intelligent man — is forging ahead with an expropriation policy that can have only one result: lowering the economic status of South Africa to rock bottom, where it can rub shoulders with…

A thought for the day: When the First World War ground to a halt exactly 100 years ago, Germany was heavily penalised financially. Financial reparations to the Allies were set at 369-billion gold marks, equivalent to about 96 000 tons of gold, but after complaints that the payments were bankrupting a struggling nation the amount…

For some time now, it has been the case that internationalisation of education cannot be separated from globalisation as a multifaceted phenomenon. This inevitably raises the question of whether such globalisation, especially given its inseparability from advanced (electronic) communicational developments (partly as a means to the sharing of knowledge and, unavoidably, economic prosperity), is judged…

‘Only when the last fish has been caught, will you realise that you cannot eat money’. We are moving perilously close to the actualisation of my paraphrase of these words from the well-known saying attributed to Alanis Obomsawin of the Abenaki tribe northeast of Montreal in Canada. The usual wording of the saying is: “When…

In philosophy, there is a saying, by Hegel, that the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk. Hence, when we take stock of our situation today, with the benefit of such hindsight, what do we perceive? Has humankind really “progressed”, in the Enlightenment sense of the word? In fact, does “progress” make any…

Some of you probably know about the so-called “happiness index” that has been published on a regular basis for some time now. It lists the countries of the world on the basis of their ‘happiness’ and obviously, the index has a way of establishing such ‘happiness’ – a number of criteria, that is. This is…