Masking decline in education

Iwaited with bated breath for the high court ruling in a matter unheard of in South Africa’s basic education history… I exhaled when a ruling was made, because the decision had not gone the way I wanted. Yes, I was in favour of a rewrite of maths paper two and physical science paper two.

For years, we have heard about the decline of the quality of education in SA: that a matric qualification is not worth the paper it’s written on, that education to bring about redress, open the doors of opportunity, enable a true culture of learning and teaching to take root and strive for ever higher levels of performance has not come to fruition.

Instead, the decline has been masked by continuously decreased pass marks, with 30% being an elementary pass.

South Africa has a reputation for having a poor education system, particularly in the fields of mathematics and science, and the low pass mark is often cited as one of the biggest problems, as it sets the bar quite low.

The elementary pass makes the barrier between success and failure one of the lowest in the world. So, a pupil can scrape through secondary school and attain a qualification that leaves them just outside the entrance pool for employment and university study. What then becomes of these children?

For me, the rewrite was more about the teaching culture of our education system – that is what I wanted put to the test. Are children being taught in a parrot-like fashion, or can they take the skills and knowledge gained in each subject further? That is what I wanted to ascertain.

My business economics teacher in high school was damaging and my parents refused to allow her to teach me, so I self-studied. I was one of the school’s top pupils (self-taught).

Education is a two-way street, the method of teaching and the method of absorbing.

We cannot expect pupils to absorb everything if it’s taught in a way that is not adaptive.

This was the best way to test the teaching fraternity on its outcomes, as well as the learning capacity of pupils.

The deterioration in performance is of great concern and we cannot call out the department of basic education if we are not willing to test the system in its entirety.