Philippa Garson
CLASS STRUGGLE
It is one thing to appoint think-tanks and talk-shops to assess the pros and cons of government policy. It is quite another to stop the relentless march of bureaucracy.
A case in point is the implementation of Curriculum 2005. Although Minister of Education Kader Asmal took the wise step of appointing an independent review committee to evaluate the successes and failures so far of outcomes-based education (OBE), he failed to take the next logical step of calling his officials to order and halting the implementation process for the next three months, until the committee makes its findings.
Thus, it is business as usual for his bureaucrats, it seems, who continue with highly problematic processes in blithe disregard of policy uncertainty up above.
While the very structure and implementation of Curriculum 2005 are under review, new materials are being hurriedly developed, and existing (and very dubious) features of the new curriculum are being consolidated with the circulation of follow-up implementation documents to provinces.
If Asmal is really serious about the review process, he should have applied the brakes. Now, even more confusion reins. Curriculum 2005 has so far been introduced in grades one, two, three and seven. As the year ticks by, high school teachers – let alone curriculum developers, publishers or the experts themselves – have no idea whether or not the new curriculum is going to be phased in at grade eight level.
When Asmal announced the appointment of the review committee last month, he said that phasing in grade eight next year was not negotiable. Now he has changed his tune, it seems, and will be guided by the committee’s findings, given that one of its briefs is “what should be done about grades four and eight?”
Phasing the new curriculum into high schools – requiring far more complex forms of school organisation – will prove to be a much more difficult task than doing so in the lower primary school levels. This in itself has proved to be such a huge challenge – some would go so far as to say calamity – that a review team must look into how to do it better.
Soon after Asmal announced the appointment of his hand-picked review committee last month, a tender went out from the national Department of Education requesting curriculum documents for grades four and eight – to be developed in the space of two weeks! Aside from the fact that millions of rands may be unnecessarily wasted, it is this same hurried and ill- considered process that led to the slapping together of shoddy and downright incomprehensible learning and teaching materials for the other grades, which in turn has led to all the chaos and confusion around the new curriculum the country now finds itself in.
Grade seven materials brought out by the national department last year, which cost R1,5-million, were hardly used, according to the provinces, because they were of such poor quality and because teachers did not receive proper training on how to use them.
Unless procedures like these are stopped, Curriculum 2005 will continue to be highly flawed and uneven in its implementation. Curriculum development is meant to be a slow and expert process, not a hurried and ad hoc throwing together of materials in a few days. While it may be argued that these materials are for piloting purposes, this same hurried process has occurred for the implementation of the lower grades and poor materials developed for pilots have not been changed one iota before national scale implementation.
Until the department halts practices like these, the problems with Curriculum 2005 will persist, review committee or not. All the research points to the fact that Curriculum 2005 has in many respects widened the gaping divide between resourced and poor schools.
While teachers at the advantaged schools are using outcomes-based education to enrich their already solid pedagogic foundations, those with less education and knowledge are ditching what they do know – like teaching reading, writing and maths – and replacing it with a confused mix of OBE jargon. They have also decided that learning OBE-style is about learning in groups, which amounts to sending children into the sun to hold discussion groups at every possible moment. No wonder so many teachers say OBE “is less work for us”.
Asmal announced at the committee’s first sitting late last month that “we have to acknowledge that pressure for visible change provoked hasty responses. The response sometimes produced poorly thought through implementation strategies.”
Curriculum 2005, he said, “as a planned process of curriculum change produced by fallible human beings can change and should change from time to time”.
If he would only take these observations to their logical conclusion.