Stop shifting the goalposts

THROWING out the old to make place for the new isn’t always a good thing. In 1994 we stood in long patient queues waiting to make the crucial mark on the ballot paper that could set us free.

Two decades later, we queue for a minimal handout that keeps us voiceless against the ungodly.

We gazetted a policy of recognition for all religions. Some called it plurality. I call it an insult. I point to the bitter irony of the sign outside St George’s Cathedral which states the obvious: “All races welcome.”

Then there is the transport system. It doesn’t matter how many taxis we put on the road. These 14- to 16-seaters cannot be an adequate replacement for larger buses that are state-subsidised. The mathematics just doesn’t work that way.

The same applies to the train services. We now have honest working people joining the lawless and torching trains just because they are late!

How can we throw away punishment for bad behaviour from our offspring and call it children’s rights?

With the advent of two working parents a few decades ago, our children have morphed from latchkey kids to electronic geeks whose good behaviour is in direct proportion to the price of their “finger toys”: tablets, Playstations, cellphones and the whole range of silicone-generated cerebral junk.

Naturally, my favourite gripe is education. We had a system called Christian National Education.

Sadly, it was used as justification for white national racist policy.

But religious study as part of a curriculum was never bad.

The equivalent of Christianity as a school subject is adequately balanced by the combination of the parochial and secular in Islam and Judaism.

Staying with education, the very architect of outcomes-based education, Dr William Spady, observed that the South African version was not working in our schools.

He didn’t say OBE doesn’t work; it just doesn’t work well in the overcrowded classes in our schools.

Besides, OBE is a methodology.

It doesn’t provide structured syllabic content. When this was finally half-admitted, we ended with the stodge of Caps (Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement), which debilitated and demotivated teachers even further.

By now the readers of my column (both of them) understand that I am not a doomsday prophet.

We can review, even at this late stage, the questionable replacements we have adopted to replace old systems that worked. We need more dialogue, more moral audits and a general willingness to face our social and political gremlins together.

Then we must agree to place the profit motive and instant gratification last on our national agenda and march forward to real progress and freedom through heightened literacy and productivity. – actabisher@gmail. com