Another class of matriculants has undergone examinations, followed by the highs and lows of success or failure. So where do we expect these young people to go now?
Another class of matriculants has undergone examinations, followed by the highs and lows of success or failure. So where do we expect these young people to go now?
Is our educational system capable of preparing our youth for a future in an uncertain world? Without even bothering to venture into the minefield of questions raised around the latest matric results, we really need to consider just how antiquated our educational system really is, when looked at against the rapidly changing world and workplace into which school leavers are thrust.
The hopes of parents who have scrimped and saved to provide a decent education for their children are increasingly dashed against the realities of work demands made by employers, who expect applicants with not only skills, but also job experience. Our dysfunctional school system is incapable of providing most youngsters with more than rudimentary training for life.
The discredited outcomes-based system is an expensive memory of a failure to acquire real life skills. This is all backed up by the fact that adults under the age of 35 represent 72% of total national unemployment. Most matriculants cannot even change an electrical plug, or a tap washer, let alone fill in a tax return or grow potatoes.
Neither can most contribute to constructing their own houses, let alone building the future of our nation. School leavers are depressingly incapable of providing work for themselves, dealing with bureaucracy or navigating the pitfalls of independent entrepreneurism.
Our educational mindset is depressingly locked into producing employees, not employers. It remains perpetuated by the neo-colonial mindset that people must be trained to labour in factories and offices and maintain a corporate-friendly infrastructure.
Where are school leavers meant to get work or training in an economic climate that favours jobless growth, where capital and profit expand while labour and work opportunities shrink? Even as the government releases its latest iterations of the National Skills Development Strategy, NSDS 3, together with associated job-creation strategies, we remain locked into the same old same old that demonstrably does not, and cannot, work in our modern, changing world.
Studies around the world highlight vocational flexibility and on-the-job training. Skills are required that enable people to adapt to changing job circumstances and to maximise initiative instead of obeisance.
Even additional years of university study are not necessarily the key to gainful employment, or at least the type of work that students envisaged. As the rather tired joke goes, you need at least a BA to become a waitron in Cape Town.
Even then, prior work experience is required. Insufficient attention has been paid to the far more realistic, useful and necessary training focused towards hands-on expertise, as opposed to university based theoretical education.
We have seriously neglected and failed to train artisans, technicians, teachers, nurses and farmers, as well as those needed to service the emerging green economy. These are the people who will not only keep the country running, but who are practically capable of building real things. The ongoing debacle of the Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas) illustrates the victory of rigid indecision and caution over visionary boldness.
The vast resources available to Setas, coupled with their failure to mesh with existing further education and training (FET) facilities, demonstrates the depth of this inertia. The new minister for advanced education, Blade Nzimande, has achieved little besides the publication of yet more theory – NSDS 3 – that may or may not work.
Our established pattern of endless rounds of dialogue, studies, lekgotlas, workshops and strategic planning give rise to yet more theoretical strategic outcomes, which seldom meet their planned expectations anyway. And who is to worry? There is bound to be a cabinet reshuffle that takes the heat off the incumbent.
This is a shortened version of Ashton's original article, which appeared on The South African Civil Society Information Service website (http://www.sacsis.org.za). Ashton is a writer and researcher working in civil society. His work can be viewed at www.ekogaia.org.
