Time to fix Education
A young Facebook friend of mine recently approached me for assistance in his efforts to get a university education. He is one of six siblings who live with their single mother. He is twenty two years old and unemployed.
This is what he wrote to me: "My friend i think to fundries to study next year because i don't qualify in varsity. ...at (XX) college i want to do parallel legally because it is one year after that i will qualify for doing teaching through UNISA because it need some other qualification to qualify if your point are less than 30 as mine."
This pathetic letter encapsulates for me everything that is wrong about our education system and our society. This is a matriculant of several years ago who is semi-literate and has never worked but who was lied to by the authorities who issued him with a certificate implying that he was educated and fit for tertiary education. That he aspires to commence teacher training one year after doing a paralegal course makes one shudder for the next generation he will teach. We are failing our young people, despite the hoopla surrounding the matric results and the vast education budget.
Not everything is wrong with our education system. There are hundreds of thousands of learners who achieve reasonable standards, and some with outstanding results after a great deal of hard work by themselves and their teachers and often many sacrifices by their parents. But the wastage of young lives is terrible: those who fail to reach Grade 12; those who fail matric; and even those who pass but whose low achievement levels condemn them to a lifetime of unemployment, poverty and frustration.
Can we really carry on in this way? We are now several school generations past the end of apartheid. We have gradually increasing pass rates (except for 2014) but Carol Paton reported recently that a study by the University of Cape Town's Centre for Higher Education Development shows that these pass rates do not reflect rising student ability. University academics bemoan the low standard of many of the students sent through by the school system, leading to an appalling failure rate wasting billions of Rand each year.