It’s not new, but getting louder: the Department of Education’s maddening mantra about improving maths and science, M & S, M & S —
There are more awards than I can count for maths and science teachers – but what about the ones for outstanding history, geography and life-orientation teachers? And, of course, there’s the new plan under discussion to pay more money to maths and science teachers than to their counterparts in the staffroom.
I’m not disagreeing that there needs to be a huge improvement in the quality of maths and science teaching. Nor do I disagree that these particular skills are needed to keep our country abreast of global technological and scientific developments.
But what I do object to is the bloated status these two learning areas are
given by being singled out for so much attention and resources. It is establishing
a hierarchy between subjects that is, I believe, devaluing other vital skills and bodies of knowledge.
What are we ultimately saying about what a ‘successful” and ‘quality” education means?
When we have a million fresh-faced mathematicians and scientists unleashed on society – is that when we’ll have cracked the code of the ‘African renaissance” and stand tall among ‘developed” nations?
It feels like social engineering of the old European communist type: we need 400 doctors, 700 scientists and 500 gymnasts. Sorry, social workers and poets and curators – the only other openings we have right now is for street sweepers.
I would argue for a set of priorities based on something more holistic. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, who developed the famous hierarchy of needs, was on to something, I think, in the five levels he identified and ordered in terms of what people need to eventually reach self-actualisation – that point at which you become what you were ‘born to be”.
It begins with the purely biological – food, water, all those necessities. The second level is a need to feel safe in one’s environment. Then comes a person’s needs for love, affection and belonging.
Once these needs are all met, one is able to reach the fourth level, where you seek self-esteem and a feeling of being of value in your world. Only then can a person reach the fifth level of self-actualisation: to develop that talent or pursue that career that is each one’s personal calling.
For the education department, this view is thick with challenges. It would need the improved provision of food and water, more attention to schools’ basic infrastructure, and a comprehensive curriculum that exposes each and every child to all society’s offerings.
Drama, languages, history, physical education – each one offers a wealth to the development of a child’s sense of self and place in the world, and each one should provide valid – and equally valuable – opportunities in the adult world beyond.
It’s not only that not everyone is born to be a mathematician or a scientist. It’s not only the strange dynamic that may appear in staffrooms as teachers feel themselves to be of less value than others simply because of their area of speciality. This obsession with maths is mainly madness because, with a society dazzled by number-crunching and technology, we may be engineering a society that is deaf to musicians, blind to theatre and indifferent to the wonder of a waning moon.