The state of education in South Africa

[Marq]

I did matric twice, once in 'b stream' and the second time in 'a stream', many moons ago.

Now I was an 'a stream' student all through my school years, but when I chose my subjects for standard 9, one of those was industrial arts, a subject that not many with so called brains had chosen. The result was that I found myself in a class of guys that were not sure if they should have left school in standard 8 to go to tech or drop out. There were two of us a streamers in this 'b stream' class. At the end of that year I was told that my standards had dropped and I was no longer ellegible to complete matric in 'a stream' unless I really jacked myself up. Mission impossible in the class I was in. The same fate was reserved for the other 'a stream' guy, who also repeated matric with me.

Looking back I realise that there was no way I would have been able to keep up the higher standards in a class where lower standards were acceptable. I would have had to achieve 110% in everything and do extra work after school just to have a fighting chance. No one had advised or probably realised that I was going downhill during the standard 9 year never to recover. I certainly did not know or realise what was happening.

The point of sharing this, is to show a few things:-

• The learner may not have the wherewithall to know what is expected or what a potential outcome will be of an action
• There is always a potential for the standard to develop at the lowest brain capacity in a class
• The teacher should be aware of what each student is capable of and compare that to the actual.
• The parent may assume that the school has their children's interests at heart and not be aware of potential failure, despite ensuring attendance and homework being done.

So I see a peter principle here (Every Learner Tends to Rise to their own Level of Incompetence), fueled by teachers who are not able to or not interested in attending to individual needs and abilities. Here were can probably point to the system, not properly training teachers and then sending them out into classrooms that have too many learners. I do not know what the student/teacher ratio is or should be but this is a factor that I have not seen or heard being discussed out there in the real world.

Parents are barely equipped to be parents never mind teachers as well. I think their duty is to see that there is discipline in the child, make sure they attend school and ensure that the child is doing some homework and extra school activities to develop a social framework. Other than that, most are working all day to pay school fees to ensure the child is taught by a professional or competent teacher.

One parent process that can help change abilities in South Africa is the situation where the grand parents look after children especially in their developing years. At the most crucial stages of growth being the first 7 years of our lives, the child is lovingly looked after by a person who is two generations behind. How can they ever be expected to catch up given that weight. Parents must take on the role they were designed to do, if we are to catch up with the rest of the western world. Current technology and teachings must be introduced to the child in the current world not at a later stage.

Education is a process of bring out the knowledge in each person - not pumping it in. This means we need to emphasis individual abilities and the methods of teaching should involve a process to develop the learners understanding of themselves and what they are capable of. Life skills and the use of current technology with a solid basic grounding in the various subjects are what is important.

Matric is just a pass to go into a higher education field - its not a beez knees thing to assume that you know something. A bachelor's only tells us, that a general understanding of a specific area of interest has been reached, it also is not the greatest thing in the world. Until the learner has some experience and can apply the knowledge they have extracted, they are useless to all.

Its a long slog and unless you know the end goals, the potentials and have life plan or an understanding on how life works you are at a complete disadvantage. Just because you are in Matric or even in grade eleven getting ready to do matric year does not guarantee that you are capable or have the inclination to do the work. Most learners I would imagine are just following a system and doing what is expected of them - why is the system then putting so much pressure on them to complete something they may not want to complete or have a feeling for?

We need all sorts of people of all levels of abilities in a country. Some will need to know about romeo and juliet and some will want to know stuff that can only be learnt on the job. Why insist on a high percentage pass rate when we should be concentrating on channeling and focusing ex learners into the economy to drive us forward? If we spend more energy in vocational guidance and see the potential in an individual based on their interests rather than a piece of paper, surely that individual would be more productive and once guided correctly be able to study further and become skilled in his work rather than be an uninterested generalist who actually knows nothing.

[Dave A]

A truly great post with many excellent points, Marq

I'd like to pick around a few of them before I get into my theory as to what the biggest problem might be.

Parents are barely equipped to be parents never mind teachers as well. I think their duty is to see that there is discipline in the child, make sure they attend school and ensure that the child is doing some homework and extra school activities to develop a social framework. Other than that, most are working all day to pay school fees to ensure the child is taught by a professional or competent teacher.

So true. And from some of what I've heard, a lot of the kids aren't getting competent teachers. One story I recall was of a school where the kids were only getting about two classes a day. The rest of the time they were lounging around without supervision as the teachers lounged around in the teachers' lounge too.

Its a long slog and unless you know the end goals, the potentials and have life plan or an understanding on how life works you are at a complete disadvantage. Just because you are in Matric or even in grade eleven getting ready to do matric year does not guarantee that you are capable or have the inclination to do the work. Most learners I would imagine are just following a system and doing what is expected of them - why is the system then putting so much pressure on them to complete something they may not want to complete or have a feeling for?

Now there's a problem. I suspect precious few kids really know what their career goals are while they're at school - other than getting the schooling stuff over, perhaps. That would seem to be a fly in the ointment for setting up career pathing options in earlier grades. I suppose the flip side is precious few people end up in the same career line as they started out on either. I certainly didn't - not even close.

Education is a process of bring out the knowledge in each person - not pumping it in.

At the very least it should be encouraging people to think for themselves, but I think this is where OBE may have failed us. This idea of bringing out the knowledge within each person is one of the cornerstones of the OBE teaching method that was introduced. Now that's fine and well if there is a solid foundation of knowledge already in there to bring out, but it's doomed to dismal failure if there isn't, or the teachers don't have the skills to properly equip the student to bring forth this knowledge. It is also resource intensive which I think we should acknowledge as one of the very real operating constraints most schools have to deal with.

To my mind though, the one thing that can turn this around in quick order is strong leadership at the school level.

I went to a high school that was supposed to be full of kids from the wrong side of the tracks. We were supposed to be the hooligans and ne'er do wells and the school had a reputation - not the good kind. However, the whole situation changed in the five years I was there, and it really started with two teachers with strong leadership skills who didn't accept that we were not expected to amount to much.

They changed the entire culture of the school. Us hooligan kids "young men" bought into their deal, and it wasn't long before the rest of the staff was doing a whole lot more than just passing the time and drawing their pay cheques too.

It didn't take more resources - it took a change in attitude, expectation and level of leadership.

When whole schools aren't performing, look at their leadership.

[Butch Hannan]

There are some very good and valid comments from all of you. Being an oxygen thief my children finished school many years ago. I have however, witnessed the drama that my grand children have had to go through. As a result of this my youngest daughter is home schooling her two children and rather successfully I might say. One of the issues that made my daughter go this way was when her son who was in std. 4 (11 years) was told how to put a condom on and how to clean his genitals in Life Orientation. He is now 15 and doing Grade 10. I believe that you must give a child the correct answers to the questions that he asks.
I agree with Dave when he mentions quality of teachers, bad management and bad leadership but I must disagree with bad students. Bad students are developed by the system due to the teachers not being allowed to discipline them for their bad behaviour. In the Life Orientation children are taught about their rights but not about their obligations to the society that they live in. One of my daughter's teacher friends has resigned due to the lack of discipline and the abuse that she is subjected to. This is a person with a degree who has maths and science as her teaching subjects and is now on the way to New Zealand.
I agree with Teco when he says that computers should be used much more.
In South Africa we have wonderful plans to fix everything that is wrong but somehow we always seem to fall short.
Butch Hannan

[tec0]

Well hitting children is just barbaric and in my case when the teacher hit me I started hitting back. Yes I give him a nice black eye because he broke his sawed-down fishing rod on me. My bum was bleeding and I just had enough because I was only guilty of the bus being late that morning. I was not the driver. It was my second year st8 and I was about done with this school thing.

So I walked up to the headmaster and wanted them to get the police... My request was never honoured. Well I can give you my sad story of a troubled unforgiving childhood but this is about education and not me.

Don’t start with discipline start with respect. If you don’t teach your children respect at home they will not respect the teachers and hitting them will only make them more rebellious I am prove of this fact. Still I had a good upbringing but I just had one of those faces that people didn’t like and the trouble hit my-way all the time. Just so that you know 4 teachers I did like I am still friends with today and I will always respect them because they respected me and I did well in their subjects.

Still I was an B student, I got a B for 4 of my six subjects the other two was math and science and unfortunately if you failed in both math and science it is game over. Unable to change my subjects I had to suffer the humiliation over and over again and started smoking heavily due to stress. I stopped smoking when I walked out of school for the last time.

Fact is I did damn well in a normal school because I never told anyone about my read write disability and I would have finished school but it is kind of difficult because when you do a math problem I wrote down 21 when it was suppose to be twelve! “Just to name one example� Still I think if the schools had better systems and took the care to understand the student and their needs there will be a lot more success stories.

Fact is we need better teachers and better systems but most important of all we need to understand that respect starts at home not at school.

[wynn]

Nope! just the ability to look up the answers.

[twinscythe12332]

In my old school, our life orientation class gave us the usual info, and some guidelines. it focused on some of the bigger issues (drugs, alcohol, abuse, how not to get your girlfriend pregnant), but it lagged behind in one very important part of life: where are you heading in terms of a career?

grade 9 ends, and we suddenly have to think about which courses we want to take. There was no real talk about how the courses we take are going to get us to where we want to go. Effectively we were choosing subjects based on our experience during grade 8 and grade 9 (not the best thing for moving into the career you want to).

I had a passion for history. my grade 8 and 9 marks were above acceptable (can't remember them exactly), I was happy being taught by any of the history teachers, and my fellow students weren't a bunch of trolls out to make my life a living hell. When I spoke to my parents about it, they weren't so eager. I could think of numerous ways to apply history, but not a whole lot that I could profit from. So I took Technical Drawing, another class I enjoyed.
Now ask yourself this question: "What happens if all the other guys are facing the same dilemma, and don't have a parental figure that will tell them not to take the class?"
This truly is where LO should have stepped in and advised us on how our decisions would affect us.

my original intention of becoming a civil engineer fell to the wayside when I looked at coding and had CTI come round to our high school to do a presentation. If CTI had come round during my subject choosing in grade 9, I probably would have done the computer programming course offered by my high school.

[tec0]

Well you where lucky in our so called “sex education� we were given nice live videos of actual abortions and that just made me so angry and so sick I stayed at home for two days. Look blood and gore in movies is not the real thing this was an actual child losing its life and it messed me up totally. To see human remains in a bloody plastic holder just broke me.

But the teacher involved got a real kick out of it and it was a “she� not a he... As far education and helping in planning your future well our school was to happy to point you to expensive test and stuff that you can take if you wanted to find out...

Still if I can have my life over I would really have loved to study music “I was good at it� and the arts but again life is about maths and science and I don’t think I will be able to overcome that problem. So still perhaps there are better systems available now like special learning programs and stuff that didn’t exist in my day. But there are no second chances; there is only living with your mistakes.

So if I was young I would give it my best shot homeschooling is a real problem solver and I think that it must be more supported.

[tonyflanigan]

"Try listening to SAfm – you big chief of education was on this morning explaining just how the education system has been a failure."



I don't listen to the radio, so, is this true?

Not my writing, copied off the Daily Dispatch blog here:
http://blogs.dispatch.co.za/dispatch...peak/#comments

[tec0]

Well that is one step in the right direction now if only they want to do more than just talk about the problem and we may actually see change...

[Dave A]

Good Morning South Africa had a good segment on this morning too - a school that had improved incredibly despite a lack of resources. As the principal said, they decided to get on with educating the kids rather than focus on what they didn't have.