Life lessons from learning to drive mom’s car
Istarted learning to drive a car when I was about 10 years old, I guess. My mother owned a 1962-63 Opel Kadett A, a two-door sedan that could do 0-100 km/h in a scintillating 21.3 seconds (though I wasn’t allowed to test that).
It had a manual gearbox, a 993cc engine, and a top speed of 120km/h (though I never got it there). Basic, basic, basic. A cheetah would’ve left us standing, and Usain Bolt would easily have beaten us in the 100m dash.
As kids we used to be given turns to drive on an old, dusty, two-track road in the veld near Witbank (Emalahleni) Dam. Remote and out of harm’s way. If you could do a handbrake incline start in that thing, on loose gravel without rolling back or damaging the clutch plate, you could drive.
I had no trouble getting my car licence in Middelburg (Nkangala) when I turned 18, because I could drive (and I already had an army licence to drive a Bedford 4.4 ton truck). Once you have sorted those two vehicles you will never have any difficulty driving something fancier.
The thing about developing skills is that if you don’t get the basics right you are unlikely to master more advanced requirements. This is a life lesson that applies to all fields of human endeavour — from surfing to mathematics. If you don’t get the axioms, don’t expect to solve anything more complicated.
A recent literacy test showed that more than 80% of SA grade 4s couldn’t read for meaning. The absence of basic skill at this early stage of development does not bode well for these children’s future. We are doing them a great disservice.
There can be no doubt that a solid education is a vital component of addressing inequality. I would argue that it may be the ticket out of poverty. No matter how advanced technology gets, a basic understanding of things will always be an advantage compared to someone who doesn’t have it.
Increasingly, and practically immediately, we are able to find the answer to almost everything using various search engines on the internet, but these answers are at best facts, not knowledge, and certainly not experience.
As Open AI launches a ChatGPT app for our mobiles we, and our children even more so, may think the need for basic education is redundant. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you want to prevail in a world increasingly influenced by bots, you had better be human. And educated.
You had better understand the difference between information and intelligence. Artificial intelligence is nothing more than the name suggests. It is neither clever nor real, and it is pretty useless without proper programming, and context.
Instead of knowing things, we now know where to find them — on our hand-held devices. How many of your friends’ telephone numbers do you actually know?
We have had enough warning, and seen enough evidence, to know that the reading cognisance problem is systemic and its solution won’t be found in superficial remedy. We will have to wrap our arms around all stakeholders — parents, teachers, children and institutions of learning — and invite them to start again, at the roots. We must so increase the intensity of the learning process that it catches up lost time.
The problem does not end in grade 4 — that is where it starts. From there it grows into a monster of insecurity, exploitation, dependency, ineptness, incompetence and inevitable failure (no matter how low you set the pass mark), until we have a nation that simply has neither the confidence nor the competence to compete in open markets, or even know what it is doing.
That is the curse we live with. Of course, it can all be fixed, probably within a decade, as long as we recognise it for what it is and make solving it the national priority.