The Big Read: Be a shepherd, not a sheep

Dear friends, thank you for the questions that came hard and fast these past few weeks. I cannot respond to all of them, but here are my thoughts on some of your queries in one place.

OGOD, or Organisasie vir Godienste-Onderrig en Demokrasie (translated, Organisation for Religious Instruction and Democracy), is correct, even if the chosen Afrikaans acronym is opportunistic. Public schools are not places in which to peddle the religion of one particular group. Public schools in our constitutional democracy are places where any and all believers, and non-believers, can study without one group's religious ceremonies being pushed down their throats. Too many schools run their assemblies on Monday morning as an extension of what happened in church on Sunday. That is wrong. In fact, it is not Christian. Our schools are multicultural and multifaith, and even sending non-Christian children out of the assembly is itself a wrong.

Children have the right to be present at all public school functions without feeling marginalised. The same holds for public schools where Muslim or Jewish (or any faith) religious rituals dominate school events. If you want a religious school, start a private school.

The politicians speaking at the Progressive Professionals Forum last week, including the president, are wrong. A patriotic curriculum is an oxymoron.

No politician or government should tell a university what should be in its curriculum. That would spell the end of autonomous places of higher learning, where any and all subjects should be available for study without the limits of ideology or geography.

The role of government is to fund universities, not define their content.

This country's universities have a long history of fighting white nationalist interference about who studied and what was studied at universities; that defence stands solid. Students are not supposed to be obedient patriots, but independent thinkers with the capacity to distinguish right from wrong.

For the parents who asked: There is little difference between the formal standard of the Independent Examinations Board and NSC National Senior Certificate examination papers.

The difference lies in the standard of markers and marking, and the standards of moderation. The IEB runs a much more controlled process when it comes to the qualifications and competence of markers and moderation standards. If one day the provinces all select their markers and moderators on the basis of high-level competency tests, then that chasm between the IEB and the NSC might be closed.

My advice is that you concentrate on placing your child in the best public or private school as far as the standards of teaching and support of pupils are concerned. That is much more important than the examinations at the end.

No, university rankings do not tell you what you need to know about the quality of teaching, the ethos of inclusion or the relevance of research in an institution. Some rankings, based on website content, are simply useless.

Others, concentrated on the research regard of scholars, offer a helpful measure of peer regard around the world. It is worth aspiring to meet such standards of excellence.

If I were to place my child in a good university I would want to know about the institutional culture, the impact of research on communities (we are in a poor country), the attitudes of lecturers towards first-year students, the opportunities for leadership development outside the classroom, and the percentage of the institutional budget devoted to school improvement in disadvantaged communities.

Africa needs a much richer set of metrics for measuring excellence that includes traditional standards of scholarship as well as the service learning impact of research and the quality of the student experience.

For those teachers and principals deeply concerned about the new policy that requires that students in the senior phase (grades 10 to 12) not be failed more than once, I share your anxiety. It is inconceivable by any education standard that a high school student be passed automatically even if he or she failed. It makes no sense to say we are preparing students for the workplace and for university/college, and then we approve a policy that will dump unskilled and barely literate youth into unemployment and frustration after school.

Yes, this will have a negative impact on your school's overall Grade 12 results and it will, of course, bring down the national pass rates unless, as some of you warned me, there is the equivalent of educational match-fixing. Worst of all, it will damage the future prospects of young people for a better life.

Thanks for asking.