The government should consult sufficiently on the retraining of under-qualified teachers
Colloquium
Hlengani Siweya
The Ministry of Education, and its mathematics and science advisers, must stop sidelining academics in working out how best to retrain maths and science schoolteachers. The ministry must begin engaging with academics on the simplest but most effective approaches to deal with the problems bedevilling the teaching of mathematics and science in our country.
We know that many of the people charged with teaching these difficult subjects at schools are unqualified and under-qualified. But there is no decisiveness on the part of the national Department of Education about what exactly it is it wants to do and how it wishes to go about it. After more than 18 months of making noises about the retraining process, the department still has nothing to show.
Science and maths educators in our colleges, technikons and universities are, in my opinion, better qualified than Cuban instructors are to deal with the retaining of our teachers. But how seriously do the education ministry’s science and mathematics advisers take science and mathematics educators in South Africa?
Because the department’s parameters for a successful retraining programme are unknown (at least for now), let me suggest that there can be no retraining worth the name without evaluation of the retrainers otherwise the sorry state of school mathematics and science education will be with us for a long time.
Frankly speaking, through no fault of their own, under-qualified teachers lack content. Any retraining programme skewed towards teaching methods is undesirable. We need to see programmes laden with content in science and mathematics.
We must also remember that many of the under-qualified teachers are products of our academic institutions. To do away with the programmes that led to undesired products, and to replace them with appropriate and relevant ones, the education department and its advisers should scrutinise the programmes and programme designers that gave birth to these teachers in the first place.
If this is not done, educators cannot guarantee that this time around their products will be fine-tuned and equipped to meet the challenges of teaching mathematics and science in a manner congruent with the direction articulated by politicians.
And, because of the accumulative nature of knowledge in mathematics, the Department of Education also would be well advised to consider retraining primary school teachers in numeracy and related areas on which students’ later years, including matric results, depend. Without that, we should not expect much.
If the education department is not properly advised on effective strategies to deal with these problems, the legacy and effect of Bantu education policies will remain with us for a long time. The impact these policies have had on science and mathematics teaching is enormous: do we want it to continue for the future generation of scientists?
Academics cannot (and should not) remain silent when wrong political decisions that will plunge society into deeper seas are taken and implemented without due regard for the views of people who have been (and still are) in the forefront of mathematics and science education in the country.
Hlengani Siweya is a senior lecturer in mathematics at the University of the North. He writes here in his personal capacity
Colloquium is a regular column in the Mail & Guardian education supplements. Students especially, but staff as well, are welcome to write about any aspect of campus life, or education more broadly. Contact the editor of the supplements, David Macfarlane: Tel (011) 727 7000; Fax (011) 727 7111; E-mail: [email protected]