It was an intense three days: at the South African Human Rights Commission’s (SAHRC) headquarters in Johannesburg, about 30 people had their chance to say their piece on the state of basic education.
A few (the government and union officials) wheeled out statistics that claimed to demonstrate the success of the system and referred to failings as ‘challenges”. Most, though, had nightmarish personal accounts, or very detailed and critical analyses, of an education system that some described as being in crisis.
But regardless of their viewpoint, what most had in common was that they spoke with passion — even when it became passionate frustration or anger.
Education is something to be passionate about. It’s where the nation puts its hope — hope for the lives of our youngsters, hope for the future success of our society.
In my opinion, no matter which way you cut it, our education system — and, therefore, the hopes of the vast majority — is on the rocks. It’s a conclusion that I have long resisted in light of the incredible mess that apartheid left behind, and the sheer size of the education system. It seemed unfair to adjudge the Department of Education’s (DoE) efforts as failing when it has had such a short time to do so much.
But the SAHRC’s hearing brought together enough critical and frustrated voices that it’s hard to deny the stark fact that large parts of our education system are as good as collapsed. This cannot simply be blamed on ‘the legacy of the past”; the present system must also account.
As educators, you would know more intimately the long list of the daily ‘challenges” you face. But let me mention just two glaring failings. First, the DoE boasts of enrolment rates nearing 100% in the General Education and Training (GET) phase. The retention rate of learners through school, though, tells a different story: only about 50% of those enrolled in Grade 1 go through to matric. In what way is this a success?
Second is the all-important question of quality. The results of two studies into learner achievement in the GET phase illustrate just how little meaningful learning is happening:
– Grade 3s scored an average of only 30% for numeracy and 39% for reading and writing in a national 2003 study;
– In 2004, numeracy and literacy levels of Grade 6 learners were assessed in the Western Cape. Only 15,6% passed the numeracy test; 35% passed the literacy test; and 63,3% failed both tests. Director General of Education Duncan Hindle described these results as ‘a national disaster” at the SAHRC hearings.
What these two studies point to is that, after six years at school, the vast majority of learners have not mastered reading and writing. So what exactly has been happening in classrooms? A national nap?
There may come a time when the DoE will have to admit that introducing outcomes-based education (OBE) and C2005 into an education system as rickety as our own was a dreadful mistake that served to unravel further, and not advance, the quality of schooling. It may also have to concede that its aspirational policies amount to absolutely nothing if they remain unworkable in real life. They’re not unlike other noble ideologies now rotting in history’s dustbin: brilliant on paper, but miserably incompatible with society’s facts.
One parent who made a submission, Mandisa Solo, said: ‘If the head has no direction, the whole body will just swivel around.” I see it a little differently: the head — the national DoE — does have a direction, but it’s leaving behind provinces, districts and schools — the body — that simply cannot follow. It’s a head that hardly seems to recognise what it’s attached to.
There was one session of the hearings that bothered me. Towards the end of day three, Hindle arrived with a briefcase-carrying contingent of education officials. While other ordinary citizens were making their oral submissions to the commission, this row of officials chatted among themselves. Not only did they lack the decency to keep quiet while others were speaking, they showed a callous lack of interest in what citizens on the receiving end of their grand plans were saying.
Is this almost-severed education head also declining to listen?
Citizen Jonathon Jansen echoed my own misgivings when he said, ‘I do not believe that these hearings [offer] much beyond symbolic value”, and that we South Africans are ever-eager to suck up ‘the language of miracles and rainbows [that] light up the political landscape”. It helps us to overlook that ‘we could collectively be accused of denying the rights of the most vulnerable children to a quality basic education, or to any education at all”.
It is my sincerest hope that the SAHRC’s report on these hearings does not amount to just another document gathering dust on bookshelves.