My view of the world resembles a Paul Nash painting and within South Africa it’s more like a Hieronymus Bosch painting of hell, with some of our politicians competing over who can best look like Monty Python’s Mr Creosote. That’s quite a mix of metaphors, but never mind.
If, by some foolish reasoning, you remove Johannesburg, criminality, violence, banditry on the country’s roads, home invasions, gender-based violence, corruption — all the way through, from outright theft, cronyism, prebendalism, predatory pricing and price gouging — unemployment, inequality, homelessness and overcrowding in prisons, you might find Dr Pangloss, Voltaire’s eternal optimist.
Try to see it, at least in South Africa, the way you play the game “Where’s Wally?”.
The 2024 matriculation pass rates are especially encouraging. On the face of things, it means that a section of the next generation of adults will have a better chance of making more informed decisions about the country’s future. If we can get more young people into Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), things may get even better.
If it were up to me (it most definitely is not and never will be), I would eradicate “maths lit” and teach mathematics, at least in the early grades — and then allow pupils to decide whether they would like to continue studying it. I would outlaw social — it’s more like political — progression, where pupils are advanced to the next year regardless of performance.
Now, I should be careful. There are, to be sure, young people in say, Grade 9 or 10 who may show genius and who would be much better placed in higher grades or even in undergraduate studies.
Consider the story of Tanishka Sujit, from Indore in Madhya Pradesh, India, who, in 2023 sat for the final exam of a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at the age of 15, and stated her intention, at that age, to study law and become the country’s chief justice. She passed her Grade 12 exams at the age of 13 immediately after passing Grade 10.
Also, and on a deeply personal level (I come from a family of tailors, bricklayers, carpenters, dressmakers, plasterers and painters, and my maternal grandmother was a “washerwoman”) if we (re-establish) vocational schools and technical training centres we should be able to produce young women (and men, I suppose) who take pride in trades and craft — twinned as it can be with advances in information and communications technology.
There is the inspirational story of Gu Huijing, a post-00s Chinese girl who was known, mainly across social media, as the “auto repair girl”, and who was invited to the final round of the 2024 Formula Student Electric China, a racing car design competition, for a job interview by a carmaker.
Having made her way through vocational training, and being the only girl in her cohort, Gu made clear her dedication to learning (and not chasing a get-rich-quick government job and a luxury automobile, skinny jeans and a rhinestone-encrusted cellphone), saying: “I still need to strengthen my foundation. I want to continue to deepen my knowledge in the automotive field, and I will use this experience as motivation to study harder. Many people think that car repair is a job for boys — this kind of thinking represents the usual stereotype of girls. I believe that professions have nothing to do with gender.”
While there is a mad rush in a place like India for government jobs and a contiguous insistence on getting a university education, we have to ask: how many PhD holders will be prepared to build homes, repair cars, paint built structures and repair electrical appliances?
Also in India, there was a report (albeit six years old) that an estimated 3,700 PhD holders and 50,000 university graduates applied for 62 posts as messengers in the Uttar Pradesh police — a job which required Grade Five as “minimum eligibility”.
“The selection for the job requires just a self-declaration that the candidate knows how to ride a bicycle” (My *** Marelize!).
Coding curriculum
Two points are that there is a difference between social/political progression, and identifying genius in young learners and fast-tracking them into areas as apparently far apart as physics and motor mechanics.
It’s a good thing that pupils will be introduced to coding during primary school. Code for Africa is doing an exceptional job around the continent. One example is Kenya, which in collaboration with Kodris Africa, began rolling out teaching coding in Silicon Savannah (the technology ecosystem created in Kenya, based somewhat on Silicon Valley in California). More than two years ago, then President Uhuru Kenyatta announced the countrywide roll-out of the coding curriculum in Kenyan primary and secondary schools.
I do not know enough about all of this to make any definitive statements, but diversification of education, across “academic” and “vocational” curricula, integrated with information and communication technology (ICT), would better prepare learners for the future.
I do have some general insights into the global surge towards ICT applications and the need for focused computer simulation (CS) programmes.
In the United Arab Emirates, where I spent last week, one of these CS programmes was part of a comparative study on the efficacy of employing a lab simulation of Newton’s second law of motion to teach physics in UAE secondary schools — as a complement to conventional teaching approaches.
The study employed a quasi-experimental design that brought together about 100 Grade 11 pupils from public schools in the city of Al Ain. Their interventions included pupil engagement in the PhET (physics education technology) interactive simulation of Newton’s second law of motion. It sounds “heavy”, and I am terribly biased when it comes to physics learning and believe it should be more deeply integrated into South Africa’s education system — all the way through.
So… the matric results gave me a little hope in the search for Dr Pangloss and pushed aside my dear friends and inspirations, (Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol, Anton Chekov and, of course, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ivan Turgenev and Fredrich Nietzsche). So unless you’re skaam kwaad, there is more reason besides the Springbok rugby team and Table Mountain to make you smile.
Now if we can only get the water and electricity supply right, and stop the guns, prevent prebendalism … and once and for all unelect the ANC. Julius Malema looks a bit like that old tumbleweed cowboy who found out that his father was murdered (the EFF) and his childhood friend (Floyd Shivambu) accused of deviousness, deceit and disloyalty.
I’m not sure what we’re going to do about Jacob Zuma. I suspect Jacob Zuma does not know what will happen to Jacob Zuma… DM