SA’s economy a root of most problems including education system – experts

Although the debate around the state of education in SA and changing the curriculum to career-orientated subjects continues, experts say while education in SA is in serious trouble, the country’s economy is the root of most of South Africa’s problems, including the education system.

According to Dr Sarah Black, research associate at the Centre for Education Rights and Transformation at the University of Johannesburg, the state of the country’s economy has pushed many people into white-collar jobs as it sets many entrepreneurs up for failure.

“The SA economy is not structured to support small enterprises, artisans and blue-collar workers. People go for academic careers because that is what pays enough for people to feed their families,” she said.

“The problem in the economy is that the discourse of entrepreneurship puts the responsibility of the economy and its structure on the little man instead of in the hands of the decision makers and policy makers.”

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However, Black said although those small artisan subjects were already offered in some schools at the national senior certificate level, many pupils were not interested because they believed those subjects could not get them into university or afford them a highend paying job.

“Those subjects are also incredibly expensive to offer, as soon as you offer practical subjects such as catering and agriculture you need to start thinking of the infrastructure and materials,” she added.

“We can’t even get proper toilets to our schools, so how can we expect the government to have the capacity for that infrastructure. Book-based subjects are cheaper to deliver.”

Black said although there was a problem in the education system, the issue was not with the type of curriculum but the bread and butter basics like numeracy and literacy, structural barriers that hinder people from accessing the
formal economy.

“The assumption that if you change the education system you can change the economy is not true, because it’s the other way around,” she said.

“The idea that people are leaving schools without career-specific subjects which are inhibiting them from getting salaries, or starting a small to medium enterprise, is a false narrative.”

She also said the impression that SA did not have a lot of entrepreneurs was also a lie. However, many people who started their own business in the formal economy failed, not because they did not work hard but because of the
way the economy was structured.

Executive dean of the education faculty at the University of Johannesburg Prof Sarah Gravett said curriculum assessment policy statements should be adapted to explicitly pay attention to competencies that are required in a fast-changing world.

“To do this it would be required to prune the curriculum to focus on core knowledge – core concepts and essential content that will serve pupils well in higher grades and in the future and to make space to deliberately infuse the competencies,” she added.

“I advocate for a life-worthy curriculum, to use the term coined by David Perkins at Harvard University. The competencies that I refer to would also serve to support the development of an entrepreneurial mindset.”

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She also said if the threestream model was implemented, as envisaged, accompanied by advocacy, it would go a long way to address the need for options.

“The three-stream model includes academic, technical-vocational and technical-occupational,” she said. Meanwhile, following the Congress of South African Students’ (Cosas) call to the government to change the school curriculum in the country to ensure that township and rural pupils received quality education at the same standard as suburban schools, Black said schools were underfunded.

“There needs to be a transformation of the curriculum. We need a career-orientated curriculum, which seeks to say that if a child is taught agriculture in school, they can easily be practical with it after matric,” said Cosas spokesperson Douglas Ngobeni.

“The only time we can respond to the quality of education in South Africa is if we have a career-orientated curriculum which speaks to our daily challenges as the young people.”

– reitumetsem@citizen.co.za