This is the seventh straight year that I have been in South Africa at matric time — either while students are frantically preparing for it as if their lives depended on the results, or while the results are being publicised, scrutinised and criticised in the press and other public forums with great drama. Both have become institutionalised cultural rituals that South Africa would best abandon.
Students spend months preparing for endless hours of examinations that simply test their memory/knowledge of things that most of them will rarely encounter or use again in their lives. And everyone — from the minister, to major academics, to journalists — weighs in on whether this particular year’s results are better than/worse than/higher than/lower than they were in some mythical year when, without exception, those who passed “deserved” to pass, and those who failed “deserved” to fail.
There was no such year, and there is no ideal pass rate. It’s all a numbers game based on cultural norms, biases and precedent.
But the key question we have to ask is: Do the matric exams measure young people’s preparation for the career and life challenges they face in the world?
Not by a long shot. Matric exams don’t measure applied competence, creativity, insight, entrepreneurship, skills, teamwork, compassion or a host of other attributes that really matter on the job, in families and in community life.
These essential qualities are overlooked each year as South Africans fall into the habit of pretending that matric scores are the be-all and end-all of educational outcomes — the illusion that they are guarantees of getting a job, life success and the main indicator of a young person’s “potential” and the illusion that a young person’s “right” to receive more formal education or training should rest on one very limiting way of measuring learning and performance. These illusions divert us from pursuing higher learning priorities.
If South Africans would stop and consider the millions of hours of time, cost and talent its students and educators spend preparing for and carrying out this annual ritual, and what the country actually gets in return, they could easily find it to be the most depressing aspect of a system crying out for change.
Having watched my own country, the United States, being dragged into a similar testing quagmire by its national and state politicians over the past decade, I wrote a book in 2001 exposing the profoundly archaic, counter-productive, “in the box” thinking that drives such systems. Its title is Beyond Counterfeit Reforms, and that’s just what all the “modern” education systems of the world are implementing these days: cosmetic, imitation, “in the box” changes that reinforce, rather than alter, the entrenched Industrial Age, self-constraining patterns of education that these countries have institutionalised, legalised, internalised and reinforced over the past century or more. Yet, more enlightened alternatives are available, right here and now.
When the “transformation” of the South African education system began after the 1994 elections and the national Department of Education proposed organising its Curriculum 2005 reforms around a set of 12 “critical outcomes”, I was one of the initial critics of this framework. Mainly because the outcomes weren’t really written in consistent “outcomes” language nor used properly in the unfolding curriculum designs. But I strongly believe that there is enormous potential within both the substance and spirit of the original framework to explicitly address and develop many of the life performance abilities and qualities noted earlier that are not addressed by matric exams and the approach to education that they encourage.
In October 2002 the Delta Foundation hosted a national conference in Port Elizabeth on models of best practice. I was invited to present an “outside the box” paper there showing how these 12 outcomes could be reframed, strengthened and used in practical ways at all levels of the system, including universities. At their essence these outcomes address and develop:
Critical, creative problem solving;
Responsible decision-making;
Effective, collaborative teamwork/ team membership;
Organised, responsible life management;
Critical, systematic investigation;
Versatile, clear, persuasive communication;
Scientifically aware, technologically adept action/implementation;
Considerate, responsible community/environmental stewardship;
Expansive, global, systemic thinking;
Inquisitive, reflective learning strategies;
Active, responsible global citizenship;
Sensitive and aesthetic awareness;
Productive educational and career competence; and
Resourceful, entrepreneurial opportunity creation.
How dramatically the system would change, and how much more benefit South Africa’s young people, economy and society would get from an education “based” on these outcomes than from the mad annual scramble to get matric results to look politically correct and educationally acceptable to competing interest groups.
For that to happen, the national department would have to place these much-neglected outcomes at centre-stage, genuinely base its curriculum reforms on them and call a halt to the annual matric drama. This could be done by convening a design team that understands the potential that lies within the critical outcomes framework and how to work with it creatively and productively. Their work could generate a new model of curriculum design, assessment and performance credentialing — one that is relevant, rigorous, future-focused and genuinely outcomes-based.
This authentic “reformation” of learning standards can happen, but only if business leaders, parents, educators and students really insist on it.
Dr William Spady is the international director of Heartlight Education and the founder of the Heartlight, South Africa Trust. He is also a leading educationist