The ideas in this book, and the conceptions of education and where and how it fits into society, are clearly my own. This framework of assumptions will affect the analysis of what has gone wrong in our schools and why. This book is not shy to draw its own clear conclusions, based on its own interpretations of the data and the literature. I am responsible for these choices.
1 Facing up to the crisis
South African children are routinely underachieving – not only among the worst in the world, but often among the worst in the southern African region and in Africa as a whole. This is despite vastly superior resources in Africa’s most industrialised nation.
There is a great divide between a small minority of schools that are doing OK and the vast majority that are in trouble. Even given the many achievements of post-apartheid democracy, this single sad theme of underperformance will not be hidden by different ways of reflecting on the truth. The stark reality is that some 60–80% of schools today might be called dysfunctional.
There is no shortage of evidence showing how badly the South African education system is performing. International comparisons evaluating literacy, numeracy and science ability clearly show that South African children are not getting it. All the stories in this book confirm the sorry tale of how poorly our education system is performing.
There is no doubt that this is something that needs to be put to rights. Education is the key to growing the skills required in a cut-throat competitive world – the skills to design, plan and implement the changes we need to go forward as a great nation.
Education is about the aspirations and opportunities that young people have. What do they want to make of their lives? Can they think creatively and innovatively about their future in a rapidly changing world? Can they be the best; do they desire to achieve excellence in everything they do?
Education is also about how we live together. What do we know about our fellow South Africans, about their cultures, their needs and aspirations? Do we understand the constitutional imperatives that bind us together? Are our children to be citizens of the world, building peace and solidarity wherever they go? Education is about our common humanity as South Africans in a global world. This is no small thing in a world and a continent beset by recession, endless wars and hatred.
Education helps us, together, to solve the pressing problems of the day, from economic to political and social crises, from global warming to ecological disaster and war.
Education means that as workers at the tip of Africa, where the cradle of civilisation began, we can nonetheless aspire to participate as space scientists contributing to the knowledge of the world or as biotechnologists on the cutting edge of research, inventing new vaccines to combat illness and disease.
It is a tall order that we demand all these things from education. Education has to change society. Like some holy spirit, its influence must reach everywhere to initiate people into the good things that society can offer; education must help us to participate and improve in every field of human and social endeavour.
As if to underline this, UNESCO, in a call around the Education For All Campaign (EFA), had this to say as it, too, planted a bold flag for the benefits of education:
There is good evidence that the benefits of education to individuals and society are enhanced when its quality is high. For example, better learning outcomes – as represented by pupils’ achievement test scores – are closely related to higher earnings in the labour market; thus, differences in quality are likely to indicate differences in individual worker productivity. Furthermore, the wage impact of education quality appears to be stronger for workers in developing countries than for those in more industrialised societies. Empirical research has also demonstrated that good schooling improves national economic potential – the quality of the labour force, again as measured by test scores, appears to be an important determinant of economic growth, and thus of the ability of governments to alleviate poverty.
Benefits do not arise only from the cognitive development that education brings. It is clear that honesty, reliability, determination, leadership ability and willingness to work within the hierarchies of modern life are all characteristics that society rewards. These skills are, in part, formed and nourished by schools. Similarly, evidence shows that bright but undisciplined male school dropouts who lack persistence and reliability earn less than others with the same levels of ability and cognitive achievement, and will continue to do so beyond school. Schools that encourage the above characteristics more successfully than others will bring greater long-term earnings benefits to the individuals who attend them.
Schools also try to encourage creativity, originality and intolerance of injustice – non-cognitive skills that can help people challenge and transform society’s hierarchies rather than accept them. These, too, are important results of good schooling, having broader benefits for society, irrespective of their impact on personal earnings.
Good quality in education also affects other aspects of individual behaviour in ways that bring strong social benefits. It is well known, for example, that the acquisition of literacy and numeracy, especially by women, has an impact upon fertility behaviour. More recently it has become clear that the cognitive skills required to make informed choices about HIV/AIDS risk and behaviour are strongly related to levels of education and literacy. For example, HIV/AIDS incidence in Uganda has fallen substantially in recent years for those with some primary or secondary education, whereas infection rates have remained unchanged for those with no schooling … 1
Education is immensely complex. It has to be, considering all the demands put on a good education.
Look at this in reverse. If education is to affect every aspect of social life, there must surely be an immense number of things in society to which education relates. These in turn will impact on education. Imagine the range of influences and issues that affect the outcomes from the education system, from physical infrastructure and governance to learning time and class size, from learner aptitude to literacy, numeracy and life skills, and from human resources to economic and labour market conditions in the community. UNESCO has identified all these and more.2 In Chapter 4 I intend to boil down all the areas of influence to three key ones. For the moment, it is enough to acknowledge how complicated it is to get everything right and everything coordinated at the same time.
This book invites South Africans to celebrate the possibilities of a good education. The desire for schools to work is high up on the list of concerns of all South Africans. During the 2009 elections, all parties had education as one of their top three priorities. The famous Polokwane conference of the ANC, which eventually led to the recall of President Mbeki and the ascendancy of Jacob Zuma, put education high on the list of resolutions for a new government to address. There was a series of calls both detailed and general.
Some resolutions called for education to become a central concern of the whole society and a responsibility beyond just the education departments. Another resolution promised to restore the ‘noble profession’ of teaching, but demanded that teachers be ‘in class, on time, teaching’ as a quid pro quo.3 Other resolutions implicitly addressed issues of poverty in education, calling idealistically for fee-free schools and free education to undergraduate level.
There is no shortage of people who want our schools to work. There is a great concern in South Africa that things are going wrong. Even the education department and education authorities reiterate again and again that things are not where they should be.
The call is out to do something about it, before it is too late. Already, thousands of young children have lost the opportunities that a sound education may have opened up. Generation after generation cannot continue to lose access to choices and the possibility of hope