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.

On 13 June 2013, The Star reported that among undergraduates at South Africa's twenty three universities only 15% end up graduating. Nicolene Murdoch of Monash South Africa discussed this failure rate and the reasons for it, including financial constraints with many students not eating for days, lack of academic preparedness and students not getting enough support from the universities.

This dismal picture reflects the situation among those fortunate enough to be admitted to one of the universities. Presumably they are the cream of the crop. Just think of the many who seek admission and cannot be accommodated. It was reported recently that the University of Johannesburg has received 111,200 applications this year and has place for only 10,500.

The University of the Witwatersrand can only admit 6,255 out of 51,000 applicants. Clearly, far too many young people have an unrealistic expectation of a university career when most of them will fail if they are admitted and many more will never be admitted. There seems to be very little adequate career counselling that could help direct people in a more promising, less academic and more practical direction where they will qualify and succeed in jobs the country needs.

What's to be done about all of this? We cannot aspire to run a modern, developing economy in a stable constitutional democracy if we continue setting up hundreds of thousands of school leavers for failure. The sheer waste of human potential borders on the criminal.

We need to start with parents first. They have to become involved in the schools that educate their children. Even poor parents can contribute to building up the school and its facilities through sweat equity and interest in what happens there. Children must know their parents are interested in their education and their school. Children must know that the alternative to trying hard at school and succeeding up to the limits of one's ability is being condemned to a life of dependence and poverty.

Parents must teach their children that there is dignity in honest labour -far better to look for work, any work, than to live off granny's pension or off government hand-outs. Better still to go and create your own business, however small.

There are many thousands of good teachers in South Africa; some of them are great teachers. Regrettably, there are also far too many mediocrities who teach, setting an example to their pupils of sloth and of accepting that second or third best is good enough. Inculcating a love of learning and helping children raise the level of their self-expectation is the mark of an inspiring teacher. Excellence in teachers must be promoted and recognised, even if the mediocrities and time-servers in the profession do not like it.

We must persuade some of the brightest and the best of our school leavers that a teaching vocation can lead to a satisfying and rewarding career.

Those teachers responsible for the matric cheating in a few dozen schools must be charged criminally and fired. No one who perverts a child's mind can be a teacher.

And then there is government. It is not possible to meet our education challenges overnight. We cannot do it if the unions run education. It may still take years to achieve it but we need consistency of policy, targeted spending on equipping teachers and schools to do the job and a focus on developing the abilities of each individual child.

The way to advance our society is to get education right. Do that and we will be honouring our constitutional obligations to our children; supplying the skills needed to run our country at every level - skills sorely lacking at present; and making a meaningful contribution to solving the poverty problem.

Douglas Gibson is a former Opposition chief whip and a former ambassador to Thailand, Laos PDR, Cambodia and Myanmar. This article first appeared in The Star.

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