The dilemma of public administration education in South Africa. Teaching or learning?

Abstract

This article points to the adverse circumstances in which public administration education and training has to take place in developing countries, more specifically in South Africa. This is especially seen in the combination of scarce resources and rapidly increasing enrolment. The consequence thereof is that the didactics of education and training suffer in becoming characterized by mere teaching instead of the promotion of learning. The article points to a serious dilemma especially faced under such difficult circumstances, namely that a curriculumeither addresses all the subjects relevant froman academic perspective and conformto international accreditation criteria, and becomes deficient in the way all these topics are taught—or opts to prioritize topics based on a skills-needs analysis and optimizes the way in which this limited number of topics is learned.