In the past few days, your social media has been flooded with photos of your parents’ first day back at school.
Oh, and your newsfeed is obviously also full of stories about the incompetence of the new 2023 admin, because children are not accepted at school and stories about bribery.
This is before we move on to the 2022 matric results, and we hear from the DA maths department about the “real” pass rate.
Also Read: 30% pass mark destroys SA youth’s intelligence – Maimane
Then we will be treated to stories of lines and horrors at universities across the country as the first years leave.
This is January’s South African dance. The question is, why do we even bother?
I am not suggesting that education at any level should be discarded, although we should put our education in front of a mirror.
Remember in the movie Ali G when he stood in the British parliament and asked, “Who here has ever used mathematics, or English?”. It’s funny because it’s almost everything we will use in life, but organic chemistry? Skeletal structure? It’s not like you need accounting at school to study accounting at most universities.
I know we should teach our kids and test their analytical skills, but what? Are you ready to matriculate? Enter university? There is no room for partial matriculation in our higher education institutions, so what about the rest?
Would you hire someone with the power to have a South African matric? Probably not.
You might use some other metrics and see extra murals on your CV. You will know that you need to teach them what they need to know about the work they need to do.
That may be true in many cases, no matter what is in the school syllabus, but we can think about how to create the best foundation.
I don’t know what to change now, but I’ll know where to start.
We must begin by asking ourselves why we teach children. Forget where and what for a moment.
We need to understand why we do school things. It will be easy to choose the reason out of the air – improve future, more suitable citizens, ready for work etc.
But whatever reason you choose, you won’t be impressed with the current results. So, maybe it’s time to take a step back and actually agree on what we want to do with elementary school.
Even looking at the 4 “strategic results-oriented objectives” on the website of the Department of Basic Education, most of them focus on the department itself but do not talk about the reasons for education in the first place.
Of course, as previously answered, but I defy anyone to find a consensus on the issue and if there is some time, it will be outdated by 2023.
We pay about R30 billion for basic education and what do we expect? When you go to the store to buy “food” and you have a few hundred to spend, you go into more detail than just grabbing something off the shelf.
You will choose a certain food based on what you want to cook based on what you have in the kitchen, what you like, how hungry you are, how many people you are cooking for.
There is a lot to think about even though the question is so simple.
Similarly, when we want to educate our children, we know that it is important. What needs to be discussed is why.
Because that will tell you how. Education for ourselves is all well and good but if we want the best for our children, we need to get what we want.