In the new world of Outcomes Based Education, which is being foisted onto all schoolgoing children whether, they like it or not childhood ends with the beginning of schooldays: it ends for certain now with the introduction of the new Grade ten to twelve phase of the new education curriculum programme next year.
Along the way six out of ten peers will vanish from the mill. They will be as the wind.
With OBE the Child has to produce 'outcomes'- a general stream of them culminating in the new curriculum grades ten to twelve. They seem to be developing into robotically controlled 'learners' producing wads of documentation daily to prove they have attained outcomesn without which they have no future and once attained can either remain on the paper mill for a few more years or collapse exhausted onto the sidelines.
Last week I spoke to a group of twelfth grade 'learners' at a dinner. I was their guest. I asked them about their workload for the so-called Matric exam that they are currently writing. After some consultation and discussion between them they said That aside from having to ingest learn and remember all the information covering their range of subject choices and the usual homework associated with it all they had in addition to complete about 108 items of work done for purposes of so-called "Portfolio Assessment"[ aka CASS or Continuous assessment].
The 'Portfolio' contains a battery of tasks that have been completed assessed and filed as evidence of work done. In theory a sensible idea, in practice it is a fair whack of work to get through in about two hundred schooldays. It certainly means the end of childhood is now nigh for all those entering Grade ten in 2006.
According to current forecasts those entering Grade ten will have to adhere to a 'lesser' version of the current Grade Twelve programme-whereby the kids produced 108 pieces of completed work in one school year. Now of course there are seven prescribed subjects for the 'new' National Senior Certificate [recently renamed from the proposed FET certificate which fell into disrepute once enough people understood its significance.]
So once this engine gets hot these grade tens will be producing work almost by rote, ironically. As one of my dinner hosts observed 'School interferes with my inner child.' Another said less charitably, 'another day another project let 'em roll, knock 'em down, move right on don't think about them once they're gone.' She shrugged her shoulders-I feel like I've been pressure-cooked her words accompanied with a wry smile.
It's a pressure cooker that discriminates against poor and under-resourced kids and the casualty rate is immense. One could speculate that many of the new wave of 'Barricadeers' manning the offensives in rural town after town currently, could well be from this new lost generation, which frankly will be repeated time after time because this new system of education which offered so much promise is turning into a bureaucratic production line manufacturing system that has incorporated the child into the process with its entire focus on production output. This system somehow becomes.."child in...paper out". The old discredited system paid much stock on the production of a rounded person with focus on the human resource concerned. The new system is simply a bean counting exercise.
The new system exists as an accounting monument. The 'Classroom learning mediator' presents a series of learning skills exercises to the 'learner' who produces a pile of paper as proof which goes into his file and is later checked by the government who now pore over all the files of work done in every school in every district [perhaps to]making sure that only approved information is contained within the pages. The pressure to perform so great that no deviance can occur never mind reach a toleration point.
In their wildest imagination the architects of the former discredited system never conceptualised such finely tuned control. One hundred and eight completed projects ranging, according to my hosts, from two or three page efforts to a few pieces in excess of 6000 words. In less than one year while hanging out thirty or forty to a class! What are we trying to do here? It is small wonder the minister has recently referred to a pending crisis in the profession with more teachers opting out than are opting in.
The teachers I've spoken to tell me they don't know what the point is of all this outpouring of stuff. They have no time in their schedules to teach anything they are so busy checking that the children have discovered for themselves the pristine principles that were once the arcane territory of 'he who knows'- that they can't remember if they know anything. They tell me they spend their entire time assessing now instead of teaching and this is because most don't realise that teaching is no longer their job they are simply bureaucratic assessors
They are not supposed to be called teachers anymore by the way broadly because they aren't supposed to teach anything. Teachers are now called "Learning outcomes Mediators". The more you think about it the more you realise it is a subtly different job. In many ways it is a more creative job and certainly could be a more exciting one if anyone had time or energy to notice.
The teachers with whom I have discussed this all tell me that their administrative load has trebled or even quadrupled. I have spoken to some five hundred teachers over the past couple of years and this theme is constant. Many are experiencing family stress as assessments steal ever more consistently into private time. A number have resigned. Most tell me they see little point in their jobs anymore especially those who are older and feel they have been turned into highly trained childminders functioning on robot control.
At the present rate within the decade the State will run out of teachers and schools will employ minders to control internet access so's kids can calculate their outcomes on the web and truly take control of their own learning, becoming liberated at last from 'teachers'. Will this work? We'll find out.
Meanwhile children experience personal stress as ever more assessments creep into childhood and turn their voyage of discovery into a tedious mind numbing exercise in filing, that huge numbers have simply abandoned. It is hard to conceive of a system more brutalising, more guaranteed to despair: more insane, which is odd given that it was supposed to do the exact opposite.
What is even more insane is that the Teacher unions have bought into a system that demands more hours than are allowed for in the Basic Conditions of Employment Act [which doesn't apply to teachers] demands vastly more work for less pay, when they should be demanding that this system inherently requires them to be more knowledgeable and more effective organisers and that therefore they should be paid three times what they are now and since this wont happen we'll have far fewer next time round and the worst of them will be promoted upwards into the bureaucracy where they can pretend to read some of the billions of pages of stuff that will be produced annually for evermore.
Billions! Yeah think about it 500,000 matriculants this year have produced 50,000,000 items of "portfolio" material amounting to about one billion pages of things of uimportance to the bureaucracy.
Multiply by three for grades ten eleven twelve and we thought the cops were having issues trying to process a million gun licences.
Why are we turning our country into a bureaucratic mindfuck worthy of ten Kafkas?
NiK
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