STOP TREATING SCHOOL LIKE A COMPETITION

AS we come to the end of another school year, the commentators will again gather to tell us how bad the year-end results are.

It is a routine that has outlived its usefulness. Here’s why: learning should not be a competition. Celebrating the few that finish school is why learning in South Africa has become a competition and not country duty.

Each year more than 300 000 learners exit that competition because they have already decided they won’t win it. Twenty-eight years after democracy, South Africa is still struggling to produce first-generation Grade 9s and Grade 12s.

Since 1994, the number of learners who do not finish school grows by 1 million every 4-5 years. That’s the failure of our education system in numbers.

Since the start of democracy, over 6 million learners have not finished school. And it is still happening. The majority of these learners comes from quintile 1, 2 and 3 schools and have suffered from multiple legacies of poverty.

As long as schooling is introduced to children as a competition from day one and not as a collective rite of passage, it will continue to have children who will exit the competition.

As long as school results are ranked as separating the bright from the dim, we will have children who will cringe from embarrassment and quietly stop participating in this name-and-shame exercise called education.

And some will take their own lives.

Until we abandon this ritual of celebrating only the bright children and ignoring the struggling children, we will continue to have hordes of them exiting the system to live in anonymous poverty for the rest of their lives.

We have to imagine the more than 300000 children who were part of the over 1.1 million children who began school in 2010 and will not finish school in 2022 watching the announcements of the matric results on television.

Your country has just announced you as part of a cohort of national failures. They will switch off the television, leave the room, as they left the classroom, and seek others who make up that cohort of failures and, with their damaged psyches, they will seek ways to make the country pay for what it did to them.

A child with five years of compulsory and quality ECD is way ahead of a child who enters the school with no ECD or Grade R education. Children whose parents cannot afford ECD and who live in quintile 1, 2 and 3 school zones start school at a distinct disadvantage.

Why can a child go to school for free in South Africa, but cannot get the most important phase of basic education – ECD from ages 2 to 6 – for free? Spending the first year of schooling making the child feel comfortable with the journey they are on for the next 12 years is the most important job of Grade 1 teachers, not giving good children stars and putting bad children in the corner.

Testing that is not meant to trip you up or catch you out and which is replaced by assessments that continually guide your learning skills in the right direction should replace this immoral competition we call exams.

Given the generational fears children have about schooling in South Africa, the one gift we can give them is to welcome them into a learning system that supports their learning journeys as a rite of passage, not a competition.

It is then that children have the desire to excel in learning.