Ask teachers about the future shape of the school system, and the picture that emerges looks even more dangerous and divided than most of us think. I have read about 80 teacher stories from around the country on the theme teaching in (and beyond) pandemic times, the provisional title of our new book. In a nutshell, there’s trouble brewing or in the more polite Afrikaans translation, hier kom groot, er ... moeilikheid.
Why? The big story of 2020 was the amount of instructional time lost in the school year since the pandemic-enforced lockdown in March. Several grades lost months of teaching. The government euphemism of a “trimmed curriculum” is nothing like a neat-and-tidy haircut. It quite simply means important grade content (apart from the useless content removed from an overloaded CAPS curriculum) was dropped to give the facade of reasonableness to the end-of-year assessments. Fine, but essential content was lost in the process.
Worse, not a single public school reported 100% attendance at the point of reopening, which means further time lost for the most vulnerable children. In many of the teacher stories there is constant reference to “the most disadvantaged learners” who are likely to lose the most from the lockdown, the staggered return to school, and the alarming rates of dropout in poor communities. In the majority of our schools, opting to stay at home did not mean the choice of online learning; it meant no learning at all.
I was particularly disturbed by the stories of foundation phase teachers. It is these teachers who are more likely to use a powerful idea in the educational world, and that is consolidation. What this means is a teacher not only teaches the concept once, but comes back to it two or more times to ensure what was taught is not only grasped, but embedded in the child’s understanding. As any experienced teacher will tell, you spend much more time doing this kind of consolidation with the weaker pupils who need more time to come to grips with new concepts. In 2020, there was little or no time for consolidation and here is the big takeaway — it is not simply that individual pupils will lack a foundation for ongoing learning in years to come, but that the school system itself will become even more unequal by aggregate learning performance. We are in trouble.
We need a movement that brings pressure on government to stop playing catch-up with the past, and start making investments in online capacities for the future.
Once in a while a journalist will surprise with an imaginative question, like this one received earlier in the week: Should government not advise parents to no longer buy expensive uniforms and needless stationery and rather invest in online resources such as data and devices? Brilliant. One teacher writes that to her surprise, when locked-down children returned to school without uniforms, it did not affect classroom discipline. To quote a random teenager, Duh! Uniforms in SA are a British colonial hangover and the sooner we get rid of them the better; talk about decolonisation! But uniforms are also costly in a time when most parents are hurting because of the loss of a much-needed job, or a precipitous decline in overall family income.
Why is the journalist’s question so important?
Simply, the schools that will survive and thrive in a post-Covid future, are those who make major readjustments in the delivery model for teaching and learning. This is no longer a middle-class or elite school option; it is a necessity if we are to bridge the growing divide between privileged and poor schools. The new technologies, moreover, are not optional “nice-to-haves” in the new economy — they are essentials for teaching and learning everywhere.
We need a movement that brings pressure on government to stop playing catch-up with the past, and start making investments in online capacities for the future. I cannot emphasise enough how important this shift has become for the policy and planning thinking of government, if the school system is to retain some viability for children of the working classes and the poor. As future lockdowns loom, we simply cannot rely on printed materials collected from school by parents who are expected to facilitate teaching at home. As every teacher of disadvantaged children now knows, the assumption that working parents are available and capable of teaching children at home is a middle-class pipe dream.
Of course, there is money for this massive course-correction proposed for rethinking the delivery model for teaching. Our problem in Mzansi is the routine corruption on a large scale that drains the public coffers and strains the trust in government. I wanted to pull out my hair this week when I read that R430m was spread across 280 companies with no relevant expertise to sanitise public schools in Gauteng. About this scandal, our effervescent MEC for education in that province says he knows nothing. Right.
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