At the height of the outcomes-based education (OBE) debates in the country, I was attending a major conference on the subject in Johannesburg. A senior trade unionist came to me and said something like: “You know professor, we agree with you, but as you know we cannot say that.” He then proceeded to the platform and lambasted mehttp://extjs.com/s.gif
http://extjs.com/s.gif for daring to suggest that “OBE will fail”, as was the title of the original paper.
Nowadays everybody from colleagues in the department of education and union leaders to the most committed comrades say openly that the great curriculum experiment of 1998 did not deliver the results hoped for. While it remains difficult to say so in these words, every pronouncement from government, such as the Foundations for Learning initiative, is an attempt to say that going back to the basics of reading, writing and reckoning is the new priority.
Indeed, the attempts by the former minister of education, Kader Asmal, to unsettle what he called “the scriptural authority” of OBE, could not go as far as he really wanted to because by the early 2000s OBE had become the ideological property of the political diehards who would rather preside over the chaos than admit to failure.
I made the original argument that OBE would fail based on two interrelated insights: my practical experiences as a teacher in impoverished school environments and my graduate training as a curriculum theorist and comparativist. Combining theory and practice, I argued that even if one agreed that this highly sophisticated curriculum was philosophically and politically agreeable (which it was not), the sheer demands it would place on teachers struggling to teach large classes were simply unattainable.
That position cost me dearly in terms of my relationship with government, let alone the unions, and I found myself marginalised from important curriculum deliberations at national level, where many of the people present had little to no training, let alone experience, in the modalities of curriculum change. The initial hurt was displaced by a more important obligation as a scholar, and that was to place intellectual integrity before political solidarity – as a teacher recently posed the dilemma of contemporary politics (solidarity before integrity).
Thinking back on the past decade, the question keeps returning in my mind: how on Earth could we have got this curriculum experiment so wrong? I have thought about this for a long time and come to two major conclusions.
For one, we had a large troop of young civil servants – such as fresh-faced college lecturers and hardnosed activists – appointed to oversee curriculum change, something they knew nothing about except in the form of street-level slogans. A highly complex endeavour was placed in the hands of people who had not only never run government departments (that was understandable) but had no training in curriculum matters (that was unforgivable).
Worse, they came in with a chip on their shoulders about the white bureaucrats, many with loads of technical capacity for curriculum change, and effectively marginalised these people – some of whom had already made their peace with the post-apartheid curriculum and were willing to be deployed by the new masters. But the new masters were arrogant and unforgiving; they knew best and the enemies of change had to be put in their place.
Secondly, the ideologues of curriculum reform, to make their point, had to put in place something so dramatically different from the inherited curriculum, that there would be a clean break between the new and the old. This was a huge mistake, for as argued many times before, the new brand of curriculum theorists then in the department of education had long removed racist content from the school syllabi and had in fact sought to align the South African curriculum with modernising trends in the rest of the world – something evident in a transitional proposal called A Curriculum Model for South Africa.
Driven by the trade unions and drawing on their counterparts in Australia, the competency-based curricula intended for the workplace found its expression in outcomes based curricula intended for schools. The goal was achieved: a highly complex curriculum so different from anything seen before was now pushed with such ideological fervour into what was expected to be a uniform “education and training system” that any resistance was politically squashed.
In the process teachers were severely disempowered with a disastrous message: “whatever you thought was true is not”. Highly experienced teachers who had long established the rhythms of teaching and learning were suddenly swamped with an impenetrable language for change. Their personal and professional confidence, built on proven expertise in getting children to read and write, took a massive dip. The weaker teachers followed the letter of the new laws, trying to make this work in the spirit of political solidarity even if every professional instinct suggested it was not right.
The new curriculum came with highly idealised Freirean ideals to boot: teachers no longer needed textbooks; no, they would create their own learning materials out of environmental resources. I cannot think of a more bizarre decision in a developing country where textbooks serve two purposes: a consultative resource for teachers and a learning resource for students. Apart from destroying the textbook publication industry – a ruthless capitalist enterprise as far as the activists-turned-civil servants were concerned – the effects on teacher development were catastrophic.
For teachers who could hardly bear these massive changes in education, the opportunity to leave the profession came in the form of a large-scale teacher rationalisation programme that came at about the same time. As expected, the most experienced teachers left the system and an already fragile education system was up for grabs.
Not all the crises of education achievement can be laid at the door of OBE, for the political culture that engulfs schools plays a complementary role in explaining why South African children are the worst performers in numeracy and literacy in the primary grades and science and mathematics in higher grades.
By political culture I refer to the fact that teachers do not teach on a predictable timetable (children in township schools, the research shows, receive a fraction of the instructional time compared with children in former white schools). This, coupled with the fact that a weak system of political accountability (such as would be provided by an inspectorate), makes it unlikely that in the poorest schools results would improve anytime soon.
The great tragedy of OBE was that it deepened the inequalities between former white schools and black schools. In the former category of schools, highly experienced teachers with ideal resource levels could interpret the curriculum in ways that made sense inside their own contexts. Some would ignore the curriculum prescripts entirely, but ensure that the administrative wrapping for reporting achievement came in the language of the state ideologues.
But in black schools the scriptural attachment to OBE meant, in a nutshell, that those already disadvantaged socially and economically showed up in the statistics as desperately under-prepared for literacy and numeracy at the grade level. As white schools started to integrate racially, the problem of curriculum differentiation between former white and black schools took on a distinctly class dimension as the deracialised middle classes separated themselves in academic achievement terms from the large masses of poor black children stuck in dysfunctional schools made worse by a disastrous curriculum invention.
Who will take responsibility for this curriculum mess in our country? Who will account for the millions upon millions of rands spent on this curriculum disaster? Who will stand up and concede that the curriculum changes were a terrible decision that widened the gap between the children of the rich and the poor? Sadly, nobody will, as is the case in so many things South African. Young comrades have long left the civil service to be “deployed” in even more lucrative positions while the department of education bravely tries to undo the mess.
Here is the problem: if you mess with a nation’s curriculum, it becomes a generational problem; undoing the calamity called OBE will, if the political courage eventually surfaces, only benefit my children’s children. But I am not holding my breath: curriculum history has a nasty habit of repeating itself.
Jonathan D Jansen is a visiting fellow at the National Research Foundation and an honorary professor of education at the University of the Witwatersrad