Читать книгу Toxic mix - Graeme Bloch - Страница 8

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 and progress.

Who can make a difference?

To do something meaningful about schools, given the deep challenges and extensive underperformance, means that everyone will have to play a role. The ANC at Polokwane was absolutely right to say that education will have to be a broad societal concern, certainly not just a concern of the educationists.

There is a variety of ways to tap the energy, the skills, the experience of citizens in this country. There are things that every single citizen can do, whether it is individuals helping the children of their domestic worker; a community making sure every child in uniform is actually attending school; graduates ploughing back their success by paying someone’s way at their old school; or companies contributing hundreds of thousands of Rand through their corporate social investments. More than money, the important thing is the range of skills that can be mobilised and the enthusiasm and energy directed to give every child a chance. Many things can happen very quickly to improve our failing schools.

There are two groups who are going to have to take most of the burden and the strain, who are most responsible for taking the initiative and showing the way to improvement. These are the professionals who make education work and sustain the learning enterprise. Firstly, of course, the government must do its job. From top to toe, from the minister at national level through to the provinces and the officials in every district, the government must be seen to work. Without excuses and unnecessary delays. Government and its officials are there to smooth the way and make the changes happen. They need to serve in a supportive and constructive way, without needless bureaucracy, paperwork and symbolic compliance for its own sake.

The other group who will really need to come on board are the teachers themselves. There are almost 400000 teachers in our schools. Not every single one can be brilliant, to be sure. There are daily examples of perseverance, of sharing of skills, of long hours and caring support, of teachers who do their jobs with integrity and knowledge. Still, too many teachers get away with not being able to teach; too many engage in antisocial and anti-educational activities, often protected by their unions. Whether teachers are or are not in class, whether they struggle to plan their year and set their agendas, whether they are doing their work well or badly, the public has a right to demand outcomes from teachers. The public needs reassurance that teachers know their trade and their profession and do it well.

Getting teachers right is priority number one if schools are going to work. It will require a mixture of support and laying down the line, an acknowledgment of the complexity of teaching and the many difficulties faced by teachers, alongside a set of demands laying out exactly what is expected of the teachers in our classrooms.

So this book sets out to appeal to all of those citizens who want to make a difference. It calls out for action from citizens who realise that things cannot continue as they are, who understand that they can in fact do something to change it. We all have to act to get things moving, to take responsibility for the challenges our country faces.

This does not mean springing to action without thought, just doing anything and everything that comes to mind all at the same time. It is impossible to fix everything all at once. This book will help to ask what the key drivers are that will have to be chosen. If together citizens really are to make an impact, they will have to find the space and the time to decide and agree on those things that will need to be the points of focus.

The starting point has to be an acknowledgment of what has gone wrong. As anti-apartheid activist, academic and one-time managing director of the World Bank Mamphela Ramphele argues in her book Laying Ghosts to Rest,4 we have to face down the demons and ghosts of the past. Not just what has gone wrong, but what the reasons are, where the causes of the roadblocks and the obstacles are.

This is not a blame game but a determination to identify points of intervention, to understand weaknesses and to decide what has to be fixed to bring the maximum gains. It requires an honest and firm gaze on the shortcomings and a willingness to name the problem.

This book is not a manual. It is not going to help you get your child into a better school. It will not tell you how to deal with discipline problems, or what to do about a headmaster who is not doing his job. It is not going to tell you how to fix a particular problem at the school where your daughter goes, or how to handle a problematic district official. It is not a ‘how to’ book in that sense of the word. Rather, it helps you to know that these kinds of problems occur right through the system of schooling in South Africa and to understand their impact and implications. Perhaps there is comfort in knowing you are not alone in your worries and concerns. It helps to understand the range of factors that may probably also be contributing to the specific problems that concern you and your child.

This book is written for South Africans who may well have children at school, and therefore certainly have a range of concerns about education. Because of their immediate issues, their minds may have become sharpened to the facts and the challenges. It is human, necessary, legitimate to do the best by your own children, to make sure that they get the most out of their years in the schooling and education system.

Where it all begins

This book is mostly about the school system. As will become clear, schools are not the only places where education happens, where values are passed on and a respect for excellence and achievement is developed. The education system as a whole forms a set of interlocked and interlinking institutions, even ‘pipelines’: this book could not deal with all the issues and fields of education without getting immensely complicated.

So, here I will concentrate mostly on schooling, more particularly on the primary and secondary schools. There will be some focus on the Further Education and Training (FET) vocational option in the last years of high school. I will obviously look at higher education, particularly whether schools are providing the well-prepared and knowledgeable young students that should be entering the universities, and whether these students are meeting with success. The implications of the school system and its linkages and flows at a number of levels are matters that cannot be sidestepped. We also cannot ignore how failures have a knock-on effect right through the educational pipeline. The entire pipeline and its flows and leakages will have to be addressed.

But this book focuses primarily on a specific band of education and does not touch on other important questions and needs in education, such as adult literacy and ‘special needs’ education. This is not simply a pragmatic choice. The school system is the solid base on which many other things rest. It is the place where most children find themselves at some stage or another. If we cannot get the schools right, it is unlikely there will be proper fixes in many of the other areas. There is enough going wrong in the schools, enough evidence to get our teeth into, enough dysfunctionality in the school system alone, to get our stomachs churning and our emotions twisted.

For all these reasons, it makes sense to focus mostly on schools, in fact on the public schooling system to be more specific, where more than 96% of children find themselves. With some focus of this kind, we can more carefully explore what the problems are and how we can develop solutions. Are there things we can do, together, to get our schools into shape? We must acknowledge that it is only the starting point of a long and extended journey on the road to a learning nation, but it is an absolutely necessary starting point.

How should we fix our schools? What will make a difference and open access to quality education for all our children? We would surely like the system to work for everyone at the same time as we struggle to build a decent educational path for our own children and in our own homes and schools. This book appeals to this sense of human solidarity and shared concern.

Education is important to the country. This is because schooling does touch on the skills outputs of the nation, whether South Africa will be at the cutting edge and able to compete with nations throughout the globe. Will we have the urge to innovate, the management systems, the ability and capabilities to implement policy plans, to decide what is essential to growing our economy and to ensuring development in South African society?

If we fixed our schools, education could contribute far more to build a shared citizenship, a respect for diversity, a tolerance for each other and for a range of views and customs. All of these are good reasons to worry about how we fix our education system in South Africa. It is a precondition for being sure that we can build a better tomorrow.

Education as it stands today continues to reproduce inequalities in society, inequalities that threaten the stability and comforts of all young people. It is true that these inequalities, and uneven power relations, grow from or originate in divisions and problems in the wider society. These inequalities, the marginalisation and exclusion that is created and reinforced, hold back many from looking ahead to a better shared tomorrow.

Most children find that the education system fails them, penalises them and almost rationalises their ongoing exclusion from the fruits of democracy and change. Education seems to reinforce inequality and shuts children out rather than being inclusive in its aspirations and effect. This is because education is embedded in society, is part of the complex social transitions and inequalities in the first fifteen years of democracy. These in turn were institutionalised well before democracy and are a part of what the democratic state inherited.

Education always reflects the wider society; it cannot but be a part of all the problems and achievements of a particular society, whether under colonialism, apartheid or democracy. A divided, greedy, cruel society will never be changed by its education system alone.

Nonetheless, education has its own dynamics too. Above all, its stories and claims of access for all, of the liberating power of knowledge and reason, mean that education will always do more than just reflect society. Education can also change society. Slowly, not always in dramatic ways, knowledge and learning can be a force for change and freedom. This force can be very fundamental and can make an impact on the basic values of a society. Education always carries this contradictory aspect: it conveys the values and concerns of a given society at a point in time, but at the same moment education holds the potential to go further than where we are, to transcend the given and imagine the new.

Identifying the fault lines

Much has been done in the first fifteen years of democracy. There have also been drastic mistakes, such as overambitious curricula, unconsidered teacher retrenchments and the failure to adequately mobilise the enthusiasm and skills base in civil society, to mention only a few.

This book is not about ‘getting the balance right’ between positive and negative criticism or about a ‘balance sheet’ assessment between good and bad policies. It is rather about identifying the weaknesses and challenges in the schooling system so that we can work smarter to fix them. It is about understanding the context, being sensitive and sympathetic to the realities and inherited limitations that make education change more difficult than we might wish.

It is also about showing clearly where it is that things are going wrong so that the appropriate interventions can be implemented. It is about focus and drive, about priorities and outcomes, and about the place of each reader in contributing to getting things right. Understanding how the system works, and how it got to where it is, can never take away the fact of human agency as the ultimate determinant of what happens.

The book will approach issues in a systematic way, to take the readers through the arguments and to examine the assumptions as we go along. The context is vital. It is important not to be flip or superficial about problems or to fall back on easy prejudices. There are so many factors at play that it pays to take things slowly, examine them carefully and make sure that all the pieces of the puzzle are in place.

The next chapter will set the scene by looking at the development of black South African education in context. I will look at the history of schooling for blacks in some detail. I will choose selected periods that set the basis for understanding the institutions of educational importance and how they worked. First of all, I will examine education in traditional society, to make the point that African society before colonialism had ways of passing on knowledge, values and skills. These were especially appropriate to the societies of the time and their needs. Formal schooling only came later.

The missionaries were the first to provide education to blacks in a systematic way. Many of the historic schools established by the missionaries are remembered with fondness as centres of excellence and achievement that played a significant role in training the leaders of the liberation struggles to come – schools such as Healdtown (1857), Adams College (1853), Lemana (1906) and Tigerkloof (1904).

But the church contribution has always been ambiguous. On the one hand, missionaries provided modern western (industrial) schooling that helped ensure advance and integration into colonial society at certain levels; on the other hand, the missionaries were also the forerunners of colonialism as it undermined traditional African society. A combination of conquest and new social divisions as capitalism and gold mining transformed South Africa helped put paid to the autonomy of African societies.

Mission schooling was to become a particular target of the Nationalist Party in 1953 as it introduced Bantu Education, which used education specifically as a weapon to ensure a cheap labour force with no rights, and to achieve the goals of segregation in South African society.

The rest of Chapter 2 engages the introduction of apartheid education, its impact, the spread of cheap mass education for blacks, and the fires of resistance that were fanned by these apartheid plans in education. In 1976 the schools exploded in open defiance of segregated education; by 1980 and the mass democratic struggles of the decade, schooling and education struggles were at the centre of resistance as part of the broader forces for change. Teachers, students and parents fought for People’s Education under the banner of the National Education Crisis Committee (NECC). This resistance and its achievements are the source of much debate, with some arguing that this was what created the anarchy and instability found in many schools today.

The chapters that follow the historical context leap straight into the contours and challenges of post-apartheid education. How is the education system performing? In Chapter 3 I examine and present evidence to show the many achievements, but also the multiple failures, in education today. This is not just a dry series of education statistics, but an analysis or diagnostic of what is going wrong.

What are the key blockages and failures in the system? How do we organise our understanding of these facts so that we know which key things are causing problems? There is a combination of factors, a toxic mix of causes that come together to keep black education in a state of disrepair. It is a fatal and complex mix of in-class or classroom failings – many related to teachers – combined with poor administration and support around the school, as well as societal factors that together conspire to hold back learners’ potential and close down opportunities.

Government and government policy surely cannot escape blame or responsibility for this. Chapter 4 will look at what government has done wrong and how actions and policies have compounded rather than resolved some of the multiplicity of problems. In any case, whatever their intentions and achievements, government programmes are clearly not hitting the ground in a forceful way; there is no critical mass that is driving changes through. Progress is painfully slow and unacceptably incremental. Progress in some areas is often countered by setbacks in others because there is little synergy driving overall towards clearly improved outcomes.

While this book tries to avoid playing the blame game, responsibility still has to be located somewhere. Understanding the context and the causes, being empathetic to the range of difficulties, still does not let officials and teachers off the hook, to be very specific.

Chapter 5 will look at what is being done to address the problems. At many different levels, there are incredible people and programmes that show the way and provide models of what might work. It is amazing to see the many successes and the many people and institutions in education working to make things better. Looking at the good things in education is not meant as an exercise to make us feel better, or to put on rose-tinted Pollyanna glasses. It is to try to find models and approaches that can work.

Chapter 6 suggests how we should build the roadmap ahead, and Chapter 7 tries to propose actions that can be performed by different stakeholders to take us forward. We need a set of practical proposals to help us intervene and contribute to processes of education improvement. We also need a clear national plan and an agreed set of priorities around which to work, so we can slot in our efforts in a loose framework and usefully coordinate ways that maximise results.

Can we fix our ailing, failing schools? Of course we can! In fact, we have to, if South Africa is to take its full place alongside other nations in the world. If we are to keep holding up our heads proudly in the world, we are going to have to be intellectually skilled and academically qualified, confident that our knowledge is global and cutting-edge.

Change will not happen quickly or overnight. Still, there are many things that can be done immediately that would make a difference. Even though there is no quick fix, if we do not start now, with urgency, with unity, we will never achieve anything in the long term either. Without a sense of urgency, our country will surely end in serious trouble, and the loss of our human potential will be unforgivable.