18 November 2008
editorial
Johannesburg — IN AN English exam at a Johannesburg private school last week, students were given the back of a Woolworths sandwich pack as a comprehension question.
They were asked, among other things, whether the guff about "free-range" chickens demonstrated political correctness - and whether the serving suggestions entrenched or challenged this.
It was outcomes-based education (OBE) at its creative, challenging best. And the suburban grade 11s who wrote the exam were highly amused. But would less bright or less advantaged teens have had as much fun? Would English second-language teachers in deep rural areas have had the resources or skills to develop exam papers this complex?
One doubts it, somehow. And that's just the problem with OBE. It's great for good teachers and clever kids. But it's disastrous for poor teachers in under-resourced schools, and even for the less bright kids in good schools who in the past could have worked hard, rote-learned and passed - but may battle with the critical and analytic thinking that the new system demands of them.
So in one sense it's welcome that the ANC-led Roadmap on Education policy review has at last recommended that OBE be reviewed and its "death certificate" issued if need be. But why now? When anyone could have told the government that the system was bad for SA any time in the past 10 years, and plenty of experts did. Why now, just as the first set of matric exams is being written under the new national OBE-based curriculum?
What those matric results will look like is anyone's guess, and particularly since this is the first time that all matriculants have had to write maths or maths literacy. Many rural schools never even offered maths before and they don't have proper maths teachers. That's surely a basic the government should have moved to fix way back in the 1990s. Instead, all that time and effort was spent on developing a fancy new curriculum that seems particularly unsuited to SA's needs, playing right into the weaknesses of its education system.
Of course old apartheid-era curriculums had to be changed, and of course teachers should think about what they want to achieve before they enter the classroom. That didn't mean, though, SA should have opted for an educational Rolls-Royce when what it needed was something far simpler, something that would make sure kids could read, write and do arithmetic before they were expected to demonstrate high-level analytical skills.
But it's too late to go back now. And in any event, too much time has been wasted on dreaming up new policies and new curriculums and not nearly enough on fixing fundamental problems, most notably the poor quality of the teaching in schools. The recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development report found SA's education had been subjected to a great deal of significant policy change and urged "a period of stability and consolidation to allow changes to take root, rather than an overloading of the change agenda".
This is where the "roadmap" opens up a useful and important debate on what's to be done. It focuses particularly on how to improve teacher quality. And it sets out a 10-point plan to sort out SA's ailing school system. It warrants serious and urgent discussion.
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