Philippa Garson
Class Struggle
A strange thing happened last week. The Teacher was paid a visit by two people from an education organisation who came to discuss partnership opportunities. Suddenly one of the visitors, who shall remain anonymous, discarded the benign “education NGO-type” hat he had walked in with, and donned another – that of surly-faced curriculum adviser to the national Department of Education.
After maintaining a low profile in the meeting thus far, he wasted no time in getting to the point: the education department was not happy with The Teacher’s advice column on outcomes-based education and Curriculum 2005. It wasn’t in line with national policy and, he remarked casually, “We are thinking of having it removed.”
How could “they” – I wasn’t sure who, exactly – think they could simply remove a column from an independent newspaper for teachers, I asked?
I was rather aghast at the strange turn in the conversation – and so was his colleague, it appeared. But unfazed, he bulldozed on: the column was not in line with national policy on Curriculum 2005 and was confusing teachers. So it should be dropped and dropped fast, was his argument.
It soon became apparent that pursuing the “free press” line of reasoning was a waste of time. He didn’t seem to get the point. So I tried another tack: Emilia Potenza, our curriculum adviser and columnist, was in fact working on contract for the Gauteng government, had written numerous textbooks on outcomes-based education and training teachers in the new curriculum. Surely she knew what she was talking about?
No, he shook his head vehemently, there were problems, lots of problems, with the column, with Potenza, even with Gauteng. With anybody who had the cheek to try to decode jargon-laden Curriculum 2005 into plain English, it appeared.
Potenza, who develops outcomes-based education resource pages in The Teacher, approached us about running a question and answer column a couple of months ago, after picking up serious confusion, anxiety and outright lack of understanding around Curriculum 2005 in her training workshops with teachers.
An advice column would help teachers realise they were not alone in grappling with their problems and that there was some help at hand, she said. We at The Teacher agreed, knowing from the letters we were receiving just how at sea teachers are when confronted with the dirty work: having to steer the education department’s much- touted flagship into their classrooms and the heads of their students.
When the department objects in this strange, offhand and rather sinister way to an advice column that simply makes aspects of the confusing and terminology-packed new curriculum slightly more accessible, the warning bells start ringing in my head.
A crude manoeuvre like this simply helps expose Curriculum 2005 for what it really is: a stubborn attempt to brand a new education ideology over the old, regardless of its merits or of teachers’ ability to understand it, let alone teach it properly.
It may make more sense in a modern world than Christian National Education, but when not taught properly it becomes stripped of its ideology and is rendered instead into a decorative but empty shell of high- sounding phrases.
The “guru” of outcomes-based education, Bill Spady, expressed deep concern at the way it was being introduced in South Africa from the start.
“Implementation” and “curriculum” fly in the face of the ideology behind the teaching approach: don’t put boxes around learning and don’t get overly obsessed with the content at the expense of the learning process, he kept saying over and over again. Secondly, he said, teacher training was insufficient; and thirdly, badly trained teachers grappling with ordinary “chalk and talk” methods were simply not ready for it.
If the education department had ploughed more of its scarce money into getting the basics right, piloting outcomes-based education in some of our more functional schools first before thrusting fancy new terminology at already ill-trained teachers, perhaps it would have some more profound, if less flamboyant, successes to trumpet.
Philippa Garson is editor of The Teacher, a sister publication to the Mail & Guardian