JONATHAN JANSEN | You’ve been screwed: new curriculum is nothing but a pillar of salt

While you were sleeping, your government has been planning a new General Education Certificate (GEC) that promises yet again to completely transform schools. At the end of grade 9, a pupil would get an actual certificate for the first time based on an assessment of competence for what is the end of compulsory schooling. This means a child could legally leave school at this point with a bright, shining certificate in hand rather than wait for one at the end of grade 12 (“matric”).

The plan is to allow those who stay to be streamed into occupational, vocational, or academic education. The occupational stream would have about 27 subjects, with hairdressing as one of them. The vocational stream would include subjects such as technical drawing and the academic stream, the current Further Education and Training band (senior high school), would continue as usual with subjects such as science, mathematics, history and economics.

The thick layers of documentation from a GEC Sector Workshop held in late July this year, describe the new curriculum arrangements with the energy and zeal of Pentecostalist faith. Great things are truly going to happen as schools pivot to preparing “the 21st century learner”. One document cajoles its education audience with this zinger: “Have you got Lot’s Wife Syndrome? Are you always looking back at the past? Are you too scared to move on?” Recall that Mrs Lot and her family were told to flee the evils of the Biblical city of Sodom. The poor woman made the fatal mistake of looking back and was instantly turned into a pillar of salt.

The 21st century learner will be filled with the entrepreneurial spirit, equipped for the digital age, learn how to be an ethical citizen and engage in critical thinking and problem solving. Instead of a focus on “learning performance” as in the heralded matric results, the focus now shifts to “learning outcomes”, with the emphasis on competences and skills, the things you can really do. The goal of assessment at this point becomes to “certify learners as evidence of having completed grade 9”. Excited? 

I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This is nonsense parading as serious curriculum reform. We have been here before. The pursuit of “learning outcomes” has been a dismal failure for those who remember outcomes-based education. We need not rehearse old criticisms of OBE here, but you cannot achieve high-level learning outcomes without high-level learning inputs. For example, since occupational and vocational curricula will be mainstreamed in ordinary schools, can we expect the significant levels of resources required in terms of state-of-the-art technical equipment and highly skilled technical teachers? As early childhood education advocates and the Technical Vocational Education & Training (TVET) colleges will attest, announcing a brand-new policy or plan means absolutely nothing without the critical resources to back it up.

This is a good time for a reality check. Most of our schools do not have the essential resources for science experiments or library books (I have been working this entire year simply to get readers into schools, let alone librarians), or decent toilets or skilled teachers. Basic things. So why on earth these feverish attempts to get us all excited about the 21st century learner? Simple.

The politicians and department personnel are stuck in a state of impotence. Without the financial resources or political will to drive basic education reform, officials resort to these flights of fantasy to at least give the impression that they are doing something worthwhile in their otherwise humdrum jobs. 

Like their predecessors from the heady days of (failed) reforms, there is a new generation of curriculum officials also eager to leave their stamp on education. But like their predecessors, they too are young and inexperienced and without the theoretical training or hard experience of doing effective curriculum change at scale. Hence all this flapping without flight while our still underperforming school system fails to take off.

“We are piloting the new reforms,” officials told me this week. I did not have the heart to tell these kind and enthusiastic curriculum officials that we have been here before, that pilots work because they are small and receive special attention, and that scaling up will always be a problem given the lack of leverage from the national department over more than 20,000 schools. 

You’ve been screwed by a government that now certifies failure (grade 9 exit), institutionalises mediocrity and, just like that, creates an elitist option in the public school system for those who are supposedly intellectually able.

Now for the real reasons the department of basic education came up with the new system. One, they know that armed with an exit-level certificate for the first time, the weaker pupils will leave the system. Two, by streaming students away from the academic track of senior high school (grades 10-12), we now have only the best and the brightest (the survivors) writing the regular matric, and guess what that does to the overall pass rate — it shoots up to near 100%, relieving politicians of the endless hand-wringing about the number of failures and dropouts in the system.

What does this mean for poor and working-class students? You’ve been screwed by a government that now certifies failure (grade 9 exit), institutionalises mediocrity (occupational and vocational streams) and, just like that, creates an elitist option in the public school system for those who are supposedly intellectually able. Put somewhat delicately, you are to blame for the failure of this government to teach you well from the foundations in primary education (almost 8 out of 10 children cannot read with understanding) through senior high school.

There is something refreshingly honest about Mrs Lot. She realised that to go forward there was an unresolved past behind her that still needed reckoning with.