Innovation may worsen education system

MOVES are afoot to make it mandatory for all children in South Africa to undergo two years of early childhood development (ECD) before they begin formal schooling in Grade 1 at the age of six.

In principle, it is a move that should be welcomed to ensure that our children are future fit by the time they leave the school system; able not to just survive in the world but to flourish.

Since April this year putting the plan into practice has been the responsibility of the Department of Basic Education. The department has since found a “number of challenges”, from underfunding to a lack of infrastructure. One of the ways it can address this is to increase the capacity at primary schools in the form of more classrooms and foundation phase teachers.

It’s something that sounds good on paper. Our basic education system tells

IN FAIRY tales, a kiss may transform a frog into a prince. In the real world, the cold kiss of fate may turn a prince into a king.

Admittedly, being the new monarch is not the role Charles once confessed during an illicitly recorded telephone conversation to desire above all else — that of being his paramour Camilla’s tampon. Nevertheless, it’s a title that the petulant, stoop-shouldered septuagenarian has coveted for a lifetime.

For the past week, social media has been bursting with the wider world expressing bemusement at the apparent love that those in the UK retain for their monarchy.

Or, at least, for Queen Elizabeth II, whose death last Thursday has unleashed an unprecedented protracted and elaborate national mourning.

The saturation media coverage that her death has received within the UK was, of course, to be expected. For 70 years Elizabeth was the single constant and reassuring presence during the decline of British power and influence internationally, and social and cultural decay at home.

But the degree of attention her passing has elicited internationally has been remarkable in a world that largely dismisses monarchy as an anachronism. For a moment, events of global import were reduced to mere punctuation marks in the royal narrative. This time, at least, the response has been measured and merited.

It’s been the grand but emotionally restrained behaviour of stiff-upper-lip British legend, none of the public paroxysms of breast-flagellating grief and keening that marked the death of Princess Diana, almost exactly 25 years earlier.

Part of the difference between the two occasions, of course, lies in the nature of the protagonists.

On the one hand, a beautiful socialite princess wronged by her callous, philandering husband and dead in a ghastly car accident before her time.

On the other hand, a 96-year-old woman drawing to the serene end of a full life – albeit of unremitting duty, which from the outside often looked less like service than servitude – and who had for more than a year been in faltering health following the death of her beloved husband.

Another part of it is perhaps that the passage of time has exposed the metaphoric rending of garments that accompanied Diana’s death for it was, at least in part, a somewhat embarrassing episode of mass hysteria, rooted in the modern age’s pathological obsession with celebrity.

Many predicted at the time that the flinty-hearted queen’s failure to dip the Royal Standard at Diana’s death, along with public anger at Charles’s perverse and unmanly obsession with the physical antithesis of Diana – Camilla’s jut-jawed resemblance to one of the queen’s elderly fell ponies is the stuff of blissful Freudian speculation – signalled the beginning of the end of the a very different story: of 100 pupils that start Grade 1, only 60 will write their matric exams 12 years later. 37 will pass. 12 will go to university. Not all of them will graduate.

We need to change the numbers, but we can only do that by fixing the system. The policies exist, the funding certainly does too, but there are far too many faults in the system: lack of accountability for teachers exacerbated by ineffective and timid, sometimes incompetent, departmental oversight.

Parents who can, vote with their feet. We are left with the bitter irony of empty classrooms in township schools and over-full classrooms in suburban schools many kilometres away from where the pupils actually live. Some parents will go even further by going private altogether.

The brutal question is whether this new policy will make any difference whatsoever – or just add to the burden on that part of the system that is already creaking under an intolerable burden.