Imagine this: seven-year-old Sizwe is stacking Lego. The letters of the alphabet are written on them and he’s trying to put them in the right order. Two other children are playing around with him – they’re not exactly helpful, but he doesn’t lose focus. Eventually, he gets A to J stacked up. His smile radiates through the classroom where several pupils are playing with clay and hula hoops, doing homework or reading.
A year ago, it was inconceivable that Sizwe would be so focused on a Lego project. For one, he didn’t know that Lego existed. And even if he had, it wouldn’t have been possible for him to work with Legos because he was illiterate, easily frustrated and unable to concentrate on anything. His frustration would turn into violent outbursts: once, when pulling him off a child he was beating, he scratched my arm until I bled.
Although already seven, he wasn’t in school – his mother, in the move from rural KwaZulu-Natal to Jeppestown, Johannesburg, had lost his birth certificate. His eight-year-old sister was in school, but she couldn’t recognise the alphabet either.
Sizwe was a child exposed to the harsh realities of poverty and a broken education system. He came to be the curious, lively, literate little boy he is today through our intervention.
At Streetlight Schools, we believe that there was a different way to do education. With three committed adults, a little aftercare centre with makeshift furniture and almost no funds, we were driven by a powerful conviction that educational excellence is possible even in the toughest conditions. Sizwe was one of our first 35 pupils at our pilot aftercare programme in Jeppestown.
We loved him and expected the best of him. We are not trained educators and there were times when it showed. But all 35 children became variations of Sizwe’s success story. Some astounding leaps of progress were made: children skipped grades, progressing to perfect test scores and getting maths distinctions after failing the subject two years in a row. Many modest, steady improvements have been made. But all of our children, all of them, truly love learning.
If you think that our results must be an exceptional story against all the odds, think again. We’re a small, young operation that is part of a global movement demonstrating that great education can, and must, thrive even in devastated places.
What is our vision for education in South Africa? We want to see buildings fixed, teachers arriving on time and in class, teaching according to clear and measurable standards based on a curriculum. We want to have motivated principals and financial transparency. We want national, provincial, districts and schools to have a mutually supportive and mutually accountable relationship.
But our current idea of reform rests on assumptions that would take more time, more money and more resources than we could ever meaningfully invest. Nonexistent infrastructure and poorly trained teachers are the two issues that broadly frame our discussions on the state of South African education.
Teachers in South Africa are more expensive than anywhere else in the world for the level of training they have; paying their salaries is the largest expenditure on the education budget by a long way. They are also demotivated and working under impossible conditions. If we addressed training, it would take at the very least 10 years to start producing better teachers and another 10 to see positive results. We are not facing one lost generation: we are facing several and we are running out of time.
Furthermore, this kind of reform doesn’t lead to a desirable outcome because what we are aiming for is close to the United States’s public education system – one of the most problematic, inequitable, unaccountable and inefficient education system of any developed economy. School improvement like this leads to what Harvard’s Professor Richard Elmore, a man who has spent his life trying to reform US public education, has called “palliative care for a dying system”.
South African schooling kills creativity, fails to teach skills that equip children for life and ignores the widening technology gap in the world. It does almost nothing to help children understand their contexts: what do South African children care more about – five aspects of Viola’s character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or the fact that they are facing a 45% chance of being unemployed after matric? Do our schools do anything to address the fabric of the society that we live in – how to deal with issues of gender, violence, poverty or inequality?
We are setting up for a 30-year battle for a reform outcome that won’t help the next generation. Is that just?
We’re not the first society to stand at the edge of an education fiasco faced with the prospect of having to start all over again. In a little Italian town called Reggio Emilia, after the devastation of World War II, a young teacher called Loris Malaguzzi shook the Italian education system with his idea that learning needed a rebirth towards humanity, curiosity and creativity. In New Orleans, after the destruction of Hurricane Katrina, the state of Louisiana allowed greater freedom and multiple education stakeholders to try a range of different approaches to education. During the Meiji restoration, the Japanese government took every good idea in Western education around at the time and implemented them better than the countries where these ideas originated.
These places had the courage to abandon broken systems in favour of humane and ambitious education reform.
And, by doing so, they produced what any good educator will tell you is quality learning.
First, they started creating happy, whole children who love themselves, their teachers and the world and want to find a place in it.
Second, results: the Reggio Emilia approach is lauded by educators, psychologists and researchers all over the world, Japan is consistently ranked as one of the best education systems and New Orleans has seen larger education gains than any equivalent school improvement efforts in the US.
By thinking about how to modernise, innovate and introduce best practice, we can create more relevant school systems than we are building now. Instead of offering children in the Eastern Cape the educational equivalent of an iron lung, we can think about distributing polio vaccinations.
Want to see our children improving their literacy abilities? How about implementing a policy allowing all grade 1s to spend most of the year drawing whatever they want to draw: it costs nothing and the results will be astonishing. We need to be smart, ambitious and compassionate with education reform: not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it’s a successful strategy.
What we do as practice in education determines our future society; I believe we can become one of these transformative stories. This is not a niche interest; it’s central to the battle for the soul of the nation.
We must achieve this mind-set shift collectively, imaginatively and with genuine commitment to the challenge and the opportunity we are facing in education – or we won’t succeed at all.
Melanie Smuts is founder and chief executive of Streetlight Schools