PEDRO MZILENI| SA needs a deeper discussion about the quality of our education system

Listening to the announcement of matric results by the basic education minister is slowly becoming a waste of time. Provincial pass rates are read out followed up by self-congratulatory messages to every regional politician in attendance.

The crux of the results – which is their detail and what they represent about our state of development as a society is not the minister’s priority when she tables this annual statement.

President Cyril Ramaphosa also spoke at the department’s lekgotla last week and followed the same script. Provincial numbers. Laughs. Appreciation to politicians, teachers and pupils. Nothing new.

Under normal circumstances where a government that is tasked with leading a national project of drastic social change through a transformative political economy, one would expect a deepened engagement with matric results from its political leaders.

For a country under apartheid 29 years ago, there should be a heightened discussion about the quality of our education, its expected outcomes, and our envisaged strategy to use it as an instrument of development.

As the two televised spectacles were unfolding, I had so many pressing questions about the key aspects of basic education, how we measure quality and what are our national challenges.

The top 10 challenges in SA are: poverty, poor public healthcare services, poor public transport, deteriorating roads and infrastructure, unemployment, alcohol abuse and drugs, poor education outcomes, racism, crime, abuse of women and children, and a deindustrialised economy that is weak, fragile and disconnected from the majority of the population.

When you are a society with these kinds of challenges, what then becomes the type of education you are supposed to offer to address them?

You need an education system that is designed to deliver three outcomes.

The first is a foundational education anchored on literacy and numeracy. Children must be able to read, write, comprehend and apply basic maths concepts from a young age . This must not be a schooling activity but a basic way of life to curate self-development.

The second is a strong focus on maths, science and African languages as the three compulsory disciplines for every child . Again, when numeracy and literacy are anchored from an early age through healthy learning and teaching habits, it becomes easier to grow the love, passion and ability to appreciate maths, science and African languages.

The third outcome should be a systematic tracking model that is able to identify the talent of each child and identify a pathway for them to live up to their best potential. In other words, while maths, science and African languages or rather literacy and numeracy will be entrenched in the basic education lifespan of a child, the same system must still be able to identify other talents in children that may sometimes shine through outside the classroom, such as sports and in the arts. Thus, our systems must not force theoretical education to those who demonstrate these traits like it is the case now.

An education designed from these three outcomes requires a capable leadership and management to execute it. The basic education and higher education systems of training should both focus on these areas to drive this project successfully.

In other words, the opening up of our post-matric options to safeguard every talent of every child would propel us as a nation to have a bigger pool of talent to achieve all our national targets.

As it stands, we are running a wasteful education system that is not designed to tackle our developmental deficits effectively and efficiently. We are wasting talent through this "one-size-fits-all" model and losing so many young people in the process.

In essence, the placement of literacy and numeracy as foundational structures of our education from early childhood up to adulthood will provide us with the necessary competencies we need to deliver a community of learners and teachers who love and appreciate maths, science and African language.

By extension, these three disciplines will give us the exact type of citizens with the right skills to build our nation.

From maths and science we will get the engineers, doctors, teachers, managers and financial experts to take good care of our institutions and harness our growth potential.

From African languages we will get the conscientised citizenship that is self-aware – a people who know their identity, heritage and history. A confident people who have confidence in their own talents to build themselves, their own economies, institutions and power for total emancipation. A people who will defeat racism, crime, drug abuse and gender-based violence to build healthy families in healthy communities.

With these issues in mind we must therefore be more awake when data is released about our education system. We need to pay attention to how many pupils from rural-township schools take maths, science and African languages. We must identify how many distinctions we are recording in this area and what else needs to be done to improve that data. We must be active in our communities as citizens, recruit the right teachers for the assignment ahead and hold the government accountable about the education and future of a black child.