Altering our pedagogic principles and didactics

In an article I authored way back in 2011 and was published by the City Press newspaper on 22 October of that year, I warned that “It is only through education that many of the socio-economic barriers can be adequately addressed, because it is only a nation whose youth is armed with education that has a future free of corruption, greed, looting and tenderpreneurship”.

Our class of 2013 matriculants will soon pursue their higher educational studies in order to equip themselves for a better future. In the recent past, debates about “curriculum change”, “better wages for educators” and the “quality of our annual grade 12 results” have occupied centre stage among academics and ordinary thinking South Africans. I propose that we, as a nation, review and if possible change our ways of teaching and what we teach our learners.

International experience teaches us that Malawian curriculum imposes that agriculture be a compulsory subject for all students in Malawi. This is because the main economic products of Malawi are tobacco, tea, cotton, groundnuts, sugar and, coffee. The main food crops are maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, sorghum; bananas, rice, and Irish potatoes, cattle, sheep and goats are raised. An important lesson here is that the education system in Malawi is outcome driven and orientated.

Most of their energy and resources are centred on agriculture. Their students are prepared from an early age to actively participate their country’s economy. Maybe we should start thinking like Malawians after all.

The saddening reality is that according to researchers only about 17 percent of South Africa’s youths between the ages of 18 and 24 are registered with a university and only about three percent of that is students at a university of technology.

Universities have become reluctant to complement the low passing scores and standards of secondary education. As a result, South Africans’ jubilation and hysteria with the annual grade 12 results only lasts for a while because many of grade 12 learners fail to make it to an institution of higher learning not because they lack funding or anything like that, but because their grade 12 national senior certificate is not worthy of a university entrance.

How on earth do we expect to produce the best of artisans, engineers, linguists, scientists and doctors out of learners with an average pass-rate of 30 to 40 percent, especially in the core subjects of language, science and mathematics? If you ask me, we have simply become too comfortable with mediocrity.

The class of 2013 must defy the odds and up their game. We shall not celebrate a learner who knows only 30 percent of the subject content and fails the other 70 percent but is considered “successful” by our education department. This is ridiculous.

But how do we fix this? How do we get our basic education working? To get our schools working, we need better accountability from those who manage schools; better teaching; fair and more resources to fight poverty. It will not be easy or quick but we have to do it: parents, communities and teachers working with government.

I wish all the best for our class of 2013. Do well and excel!