Philippa Garson
Class Struggle
There’s nothing like an avalanche of blunt facts to send politicians and theorists scuttling back to the drawing board – at least one hopes so.
When confronted with the disturbing, grainy footage of real life, rather than the crisply sanitised version stamped on to the pages of our many White Papers and legislative and policy documents, you have the choice of covering your eyes with all the papers or sitting up and taking stock.
Time will tell what the policymakers in the Department of Education will do with the alarming findings of the President’s Education Initiative Research Project, the subject of intense discussion at a secretive departmental meeting in Vanderbijlpark recently.
Getting Learning Right, the tome to emerge from a sweeping and in-depth research process done by 36 research agencies in more than 300 schools around the country and authored by Nick Taylor and Penny Vinjevold, is a stark warning that unless the quality of teaching is improved on a massive scale and budgets are redirected to give more money to teacher training and classroom resources, our education system is headed for the dustbin.
So far, the education department appears to be suitably concerned by the findings, the product of a government-sponsored project after all. When President Nelson Mandela invited foreign governments to help us solve our pressing education problems, they crowded around the table, hypnotised as usual by Madiba magic, and donated R250-million towards the president’s education initiative’s various projects. The Danish International Development Agency gave the R4- million necessary for this particular research endeavour, and some of its many findings are horrifying, to say the least.
They confirm what many of us have suspected all along: foundation-phase teachers, who lack proper knowledge of their subjects, are so confused about what Curriculum 2005 requires of them that they have abandoned the traditional “three Rs” approach and not replaced it with anything resembling outcomes-based education. Many are not even teaching basic reading or numeracy in the foundation phase. They are locking away perfectly good textbooks because they do not have outcomes-based education scrawled all over them.
Yet because teachers’ knowledge of content is so poor, they are unable to replace the old with much else. They simply cannot do what Curriculum 2005 requires of them, like design their own learning programmes and develop their own assessment strategies. Their inadequate content knowledge and failure to come to grips with Curriculum 2005 are having a negative impact on their pupils, who are suffering in both the lower and higher grades.
Researchers found that “what students know and can do is dismal”. Grade four and five pupils are using worksheets more suitable to grade one and are writing words and phrases instead of sentences; little or no reading is taking place. Where students should be using four-digit figures in maths they are still doing basic one-digit sums. The tragic list goes on. Some teachers tested on the same work as their pupils were no further ahead. This research also showed that teachers who performed well in the tests produced students who performed well.
The writing is on the wall: high-quality pre-service and in-service teacher training that helps teachers master the subjects they teach and that eases them into outcomes-based education is required on a massive scale. Hopefully the findings of Getting Learning Right will put the brakes on plans to implement grade seven in the new curriculum next year.
The research on language use in the classroom shows that people do not fit into the neat, politically correct categories that theorists and political ideologues would have us believe. Though the virtues of mother-tongue learning have been much touted, and tie in well with fashionable “African renaissance” thinking, it is clear that most parents want their children to learn in English. Not only do they “see English as the language of power and access to higher education and jobs” in a global society, but they experience the emphasis on mother-tongue learning as uncomfortably close to the ethnic stereotyping of apartheid days.
The research argues that the notion of a single mother-tongue language is being eroded by urbanisation and the tremendous movements in the school system. Most urban township dwellers speak different languages or at least a mix of more than one language. Children are schooling in far-off places that bear little resemblance to home circumstances. Not suprisingly, none of the schools researched in the project had developed their own language policy, which is supposed to promote multilingualism and mother-tongue instruction in the early years.
Research into teachers’ practices also showed an endemically bad work ethic, widespread absenteeism on monthly pay days, time wasted on union activities, no working after school hours, and months of teaching time wasted on preparing and marking exams.
Some education officials have criticised the research for looking only at badly functioning schools and for failing to capture some of the many good and innovative educational practices around the country. Indeed that may be true. But sweeping research done by many agencies into many schools around the country – schools that researchers argue are at worst minimally functioning rather than non- functional like so many others – surely resonate with weighty truth. The researchers say that these arguments and counter-arguments take place in a vacuum as there is no database reflecting the numbers of good, poor and non-functioning schools to begin with.
ENDS
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