SA education catastrophe

THE announcement by the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga that history will be made compulsory from Grade 10 to 12 by 2022 has opened up a number of debates on education in the country at many levels.

The debate about what should be included in the syllabus should not be decided by how wonderful a subject is but on how relevant a subject is in terms of helping learners to grow, and to enable them to choose a career based on their aptitude or interest.

The current matriculation requirement seem to have its roots in an era, almost a century ago, when access to information was extremely limited and so were choices. Much of it was handed down from an era where six subjects were made compulsory in a pejorative or prescriptive way.

Little thought was given to the relevance of these subjects in the current situation, where artificial intelligence (AI) should be of paramount concern.

Most subjects in the past were geared for a professional or academic life, even though only a minority qualified to follow an academic route while the majority ended up in the technical world in electronics, industries or became artisans in the various trades at the time.

In the past, pupils who left school at Standard 8, now Grade 10, could find work as teachers or in factories and through years of training in the workplace, could work their way up to becoming managers and directors. Today, many of the old type of factories are closed and new industries have arisen, requiring different or specialised skills.

The qualifications required to gain entry into the new jobs of the future are being offered by our technical colleges and via the internet through distance learning and not in our schools and our costly universities.

Children should be introduced to IT and business skills to make them entrepreneurs to prepare them for the job market. They should be taught how to save and invest.

According to Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, “if we do not change the way we teach our children we will be in big trouble in 30 years”, as if to say that we are not in trouble already.

Experts have been predicting that 50% of the current jobs will be redundant in 30 years.

Our universities, in a very parochial way, are still preparing our students for an industrialised world when we are fast heading for a world of AI and robotics.

Alvin Toffler in his book Future Shock written in the ’70s, advised societies in the 21st century “to learn, to unlearn to relearn”. Clearly our experts haven’t taken his advice.

If we wish to avoid a catastrophe in our education, then policy and design of the curriculum should be made with contributions from all the stake holders and not just a handful of selfacclaimed experts, as it was always done in the past.

Finally, no pupil should be forced to do a particular subject; they must be allowed to choose subjects based on their aptitudes and interest with the help of a career guidance counsellor; after all, it is the individual’s future at stake not that of the expert, whose only interest is to award worthless certificates, which merely swells the ranks of the educated unemployed.