Schools need to get back to basics. There was nothing wrong with our education system until the 90s, but with the ‘New South Africa’, we had to adopt a new education system, regardless of whether the old one worked or not. And work it did.
Schools need to get back to basics. There was nothing wrong with our education system until the 90s, but with the ‘New South Africa’, we had to adopt a new education system, regardless of whether the old one worked or not. And work it did.
In those days, the Cape Education Department took on the English and Scottish education system, which had been carefully thought out over time and worked well in Britain since the 1800s. Then a group of politically correct ‘experts’ put their heads together to form Outcomes Based Education (OBE), an education theory chock-a-block with jargon and full of ‘isms’ – rationalism, reductionism, postmodernism and above all, ‘obscurism’.
By 2001 OBE was the in thing. The latest sensation involved changing names of everything (pupils became ‘learners’ and teachers became ‘educators’), as if that was enough in itself to revolutionise education.
Learners were encouraged to ‘discover’ knowledge for themselves whilst educators ‘facilitated’ this process.
I have no idea why lecturers cooed over this politically correct and loosely-bound complex collection of ideas, but what I do know is that my PGCE class hated it, as did the vast majority of teachers who had to deal with OBE on a day to day basis. I think a lot of lecturers and professors live in cloud cuckoo land… A world of theory and not reality, where they develop and adopt new ideas for their amusement and self esteem.
Thank goodness OBE was scrapped in 2010, after costing both ‘learners’ and ‘educators’ years of frustration and the taxpayer untold amounts of money. Furthermore, it made a mockery of our education system by lowering standards and causing complete chaos. OBE had not succeeded anywhere, so why on earth did we adopt it here? South Africans need to start learning that history repeats itself. We need to wake up and stop thinking we are so smart and that “it will be different this time”. We should instead look humbly and carefully at what mistakes other countries have made in order to avoid years of futility and pain. For example; what happened to the countries where resources were nationalised and land expropriated?
So what can we do to help our education system and quench the thirst of the masses of children in need of a basic education? Everyone knows that we need more teachers and everyone knows how important subjects like maths and science are. And what can the Department of Education do to solve the problem?
They can institute a plan whereby any pupil who attains a B symbol for either maths or science has an immediate job opportunity open for them to teach at a government school as an intern maths or science teacher. Note that I used the word ‘pupil’ instead of ‘learner’ because, apart from being sick and tired of having politically correct university lecturers demanding that the word ‘learner’ be used instead of ‘pupil’, every human being, both in and out of school is learning new things and is therefore a ‘learner’ at every stage of his or her life.
To get back to the plan: the intern teachers could be paid a portion of a full-time teacher’s salary for a year or two, and then become a full-time teacher themselves, if successful at the job. The money that the Department of Education has become accustomed to wasting on a ‘herd of white elephants’ should be carefully put aside for employing intern teachers. This would soon create thousands of crucial maths and science teaching posts at desperate government schools, and after a few years of practical teaching exposure, the intern teachers should end up teaching just as well as the other teachers.
Being a school teacher is said to be a ‘calling’, so if you are ‘called’ to be a teacher and you put some effort into the career, you are bound to be a good teacher, regardless of whether you are straight out of school or have spent four years at a university. Desperate circumstances call for desperate measures, and the present circumstances in South Africa dictate that we call thousands of new school teachers into practical training at any cost, just like Britain had to train up thousands of pilots and get them airborne within weeks in order to save democracy in the northern hemisphere. Teaching is purely about hard work, dedication, and learning as you go along. It is not vital to have a university degree or a teachers’ diploma to teach well because teachers learn the ropes from other teachers and from classroom experience.
If you are a child from a poor family and you know that next year you can secure an intern job as a teacher if you do well enough in maths or science, you are going to put every bit of effort into studying these subjects. On the other hand, if pupils know that they do not have much of a chance of getting a bursary to university, and that even if they do it will be years of study before they can become a teacher, a measure of doubt and hopelessness will set in. This will directly affect the amount of effort they put in, their results and their futures. This sense of hopelessness sets in because they know that even if they do manage to get scholarships or bursaries, studying is not cheap and that the whole process could wind up with years of financial stress and heavy bank loans for them and their families.
I have taught high school maths in two township schools, and have seen the talent on the one hand, and the very fragile hope on the other – a hope that you see on the surface, but a hope that doesn’t go deep because it has been broken so many times before. Many children smile and laugh and talk about their futures, about bursaries, about university and careers, but deep down inside they know the reality. They see it around them every day: fellow pupils and friends and family who had the same hopes when they were in school, now sitting at home with no jobs and no apparent future. Children who see this every day have a hard time truly believing in their future – their reality becomes the here and now. They have a hard time grasping the concept that if they are lucky they may be able to become a teacher in a few years’ time.
So, many talented children join the ranks of their fellow pupils, friends and family – children who could have achieved a B in maths or science if there was hope in the foreseeable future, children who excelled in maths or science and attained B symbols for these, but did not do well enough on aggregate to proceed to a tertiary institution. And to this list can be added the many students who did get bursaries to study further but ended up dropping out because of various stresses or financial difficulties.
Imagine if a good portion of those pupils became intern maths and science teachers in our schools? They would be working in a field where they are talented, and would be learning the valuable skill of teaching, while imparting crucial knowledge to our masses of educationally-deprived school children, many of whom would otherwise be sitting forlornly at their desks, with one empty desk at the front of the class. A full classroom without a teacher is a heart-rending sight.
I have seen how quickly the pupils who help their classmates learn themselves. By the end of matric they are often able to stand up at the front of the class and teach just as well as any qualified teacher – and they love doing it too!
South Africa must steer towards internship training straight after school – internships in all fields of work and not only in teaching. With world recession and hard economic times ahead, society must become geared towards the old-fashioned ways of apprenticeship. This is preferable to the long-winded university degrees which often involve debt and hefty bank loans. Education is a safe place to start this.
Much of the fault behind the erroneous thinking in poorer countries lies with the fact that the majority of citizens have not had the opportunity to learn how to reason logically and think critically by being exposed to maths and science-based subjects from a young age. So let’s give them that chance – at any cost – and enlighten and save our beloved country.
