Humpty Dumpty education needs consolidation
HAVING had my child in a former Model C school in the Western Cape in grade one, I experienced the issue of doing the teachers’ work, by explaining and using items, as my grade one teacher in 1977 did. Items like beans and blocks helped counting and teaching phonics.
What I noticed was, presently, teachers do not do phonics, and although my child scored all 7s on her report, she struggled with phonics. To cut a long story short, I withdrew my child from the state school and put her in home-schooling.
I visited two schools in Parkside, East London, where I completed my primary schooling. Both schools were Afrikaans medium schools but had to change to English to accommodate the influx of Xhosa-speaking scholars.
Along came the new curriculum with its own challenges in already overcrowded schools.
The majority of the parents in disadvantaged schools cannot help their children because the parents do not understand either English or Afrikaans.
From my interviews with individual Foundation Phase teachers, my conclusion is that the new curriculum does not have space for repetition and consolidation of the work a grade one child has to master. The average and “slow” children are suffering.
This situation makes the child stressed, the parents depressed and puts the teacher on the border of heart failure. What was wrong with the old curriculum?
I just want to thank especially my primary and especially Foundation Phase teachers for the competent manner in which they taught me and prepared me to face life’s challenges.
Were there opportunities for the Foundation Phase teachers to complain or give input when the new curriculum was being considered?
Because if the Foundation Phase is not consolidated well, we are going to have a Humpty Dumpty problem. Nobody will be able to fix it – not all the king’s horses ( the inspectors and education advisors), nor all the king’s men (the ministers who allowed this curriculum).
We have “one curriculum for the country” – but was it ever considered that the teachers with the 44-plus children in their classes will always be at a disadvantage? The disadvantaged and poorly resourced schools where the majority of black children attend face huge challenges.
Present policy states pupils must preferably progress with their age cohorts, which mean pupils can only be retained once in a phase. This compounds the teacher’s load because they have children in their classes who are not ready for that particular grade.
We have a first world curriculum in a third world country.
I have a great respect for the teachers in the mainstream schools who struggle with children and the curriculum. What about the parents that dropped out of school in grades eight or even six? They will not even know how to help the child.
This country struggled for freedom from apartheid and now we struggle for financial and educational freedom. Freedom for parents to help their children but not to turn a family evening into a replay of the child’s school day.
There is nothing like going back to the education roots: repetition, consolidation and phonics.