Philippa Garson
The radical findings of the curriculum review committee, set up to investigate the workability of Curriculum 2005, signal the long-overdue arrival of some clarity and reason on the issue.
The Department of Education has for years doggedly pushed ahead with the implementation of an essentially flawed and jargon-laden curriculum, despite cries of confusion from teachers. But in February Minister of Education Kader Asmal appointed a review committee of independent educationists to research key aspects of Curriculum 2005.
The 11-member team has found that Curriculum 2005 in its present form is poorly designed and inadequately understood by teachers – and should be replaced with a simplified, more streamlined and more content-specific version of outcomes-based education.
Asmal this week welcomed it as “sober, down-to-earth and filled with practical analysis”.
In essence the team has found that Curriculum 2005 is over-designed and lacks an emphasis on the basics of language, reading skills and numeracy. It has a confusing and unnecessary plethora of design features which mystify teachers and shift their focus away from important conceptual and content issues. It fails to give teachers guidelines on the sequential and progressive steps of knowledge acquisition.
The team recommends the scrapping of two of the eight learning areas (economic and management sciences and technology, and incorporating aspects of them into the remaining six), the 66 specific outcomes, and unnecessary features such as performance indicators, and programme and phase organisers. It recommends instead a national curriculum statement with four instead of the existing eight design features.
The team believes it is too late to halt the implementation of grades four and eight next year, but that grade four should be “overtaken by a revised, streamlined curriculum” and grade eight continued on a “modified basis”.
The review team found that teachers have a “shallow” understanding of Curriculum 2005, partly because training has been inadequate, but also because of fundamental design flaws which render it almost impossible to translate into sound classroom practice.
“Although an outcomes-based education system concentrates on outputs, concepts and content cannot be ignored,” said team member Joe Muller. New Zealand and other countries embracing outcomes-based education have returned to a more content-based approach.
The team found many popular myths around Curriculum 2005 prevail among teachers, such as that reading need not be taught, that content is not important, that textbooks are unnecessary and that “anything goes”.
Current models of training teachers are highly flawed, with misconceptions passed down the line. Learning materials put out by the Department of Education were found to be inadequate, confusing, in short supply and little used by teachers. The learning materials were often “superficial, because course content was under-specified”, said team member Emilia Potenza.
“They were received late and tended not to be used by teachers, partly because they were not available in languages other than English.”
Review team leader Linda Chisholm, who has been appointed at deputy director general level by the department on a Billiton Fellowship to oversee the next phase of curriculum revision, said the curriculum needed to be phased in far more gradually.
She said a co-ordinated national strategy for the training of teachers needed to be found.