First we fail our children, now we get rid of ‘dumb’ ones

One of the most spectacular failures of the ANC-led government over the past 25 years has undoubtedly been education.

This failure has not only been limited to the teaching environment in the classroom, but extends far beyond the syllabus and how it is taught. There is no doubt the government inherited an almost dysfunctional education system, but it would be disingenuous to point to that as the main reason for the current state of basic education more than two decades later.

The failure to eradicate inequalities in rural parts of provinces, such as the Eastern Cape and Limpopo, come down to nothing other than bad management.

There is no excuse for any child to be still attending school under a tree – a move that forced civil society structures like Section 27 to take the government to court to force them to provide mobile classrooms.

It would also take the same pressure groups to force the department of basic education to put in place a plan to get rid of pit latrines, following the deaths of kids like Michael Komape.

Let’s not even dwell on the disastrous introduction of Outcomes Based Education (OBE), which was then reversed after it was blamed in delivering undercooked students to institutions of higher learning. While its intentions were noble, the implementation of OBE was a total disaster, resulting in literacy and numeracy levels dropping in public schools.

One cannot leave out the hindrance that has come through allowing teachers unions from becoming a law unto themselves in certain cases. That has brought the country to where it is now.

The announcement by the department that a Grade 9 certificate will be introduced into the system as an exit point might sound noble to those wanting quick solutions to the poor state of education – but it is, in essence, a public admission that the system is broken and the various plans tried to fix it are not working.

In the basic education minister’s own words: “By the time we go to Grade 10,11, 12, we start to observe high dropout rates and one of the findings in our research, also the Household Survey, is that when they go to higher grades, they can’t cope with the curriculum, which means they are bringing deficits with them from lower grades.

“That is why we don’t even have 100% pass rates; they struggle when they get to the FET phase and that means there are deficits they have been carrying through the system and that is why some drop out”.

There are “deficits that they’ve been carrying through the system”, “deficits that they are bringing with them from lower grades”. You would be excused to think that the lower grades the minister is referring to form part of a different education system not run by her department. But the truth is, her department is responsible for those deficits – and instead of seeking proper solutions to the problem, an exit strategy for kids with deficits is introduced.

The introduction of the 30% pass mark for certain subjects was not enough to up the matric pass rate, and new ways had to be found to get rid of those kids that can’t achieve even that “dumbed down” school-leaving pass mark – the Grade 9 certificate.

Those that put the disastrous bantu education policies in place in the ’50s must be smiling because their diabolical plan is still being carried out in the democratic era.

Sydney Majoko.

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