I am reading an editorial piece from the City Press 31 December 2006 [the matric picture must change]. In this piece the writer bewails the fact that in the recent matric exams the children of the new ruling class, whom he/she refers to as 'African' do not make a serious demographic dent in the Honours roll of Matric results. This class you will remember was the first post '94 class; everyone free to learn and achieve.
Also in front of me is a copy of my letter that was published in the Star newspaper on the 16th February 1990. It was headlined 'Campaigners for liberation before education have won.'
So my first thought is that the writer has become confused, he/she has completely ignored the impressive achievement by some 320,000 so-called 'African' candidates and is either being disingenuous or has completely forgotten what it was that motivated that drive to ungovernability that characterised the closing days of the Apartheid era - liberation came before education, in fact before everything and focussing on education was only something that came later.
So to become almost irrational over the outcome now because 'your guys' feature disproportionately in the top hundred whatever achievers is incongruent and will send out a confusing message to those who are working hard at the lower levels and who will only start to reveal themselves in 2008 which will be when the new [you mustn't call it matric] 'School leaving certificate for grade twelve' becomes de rigeur. [I'm sure we will continue to have the 'honours roll' though.]
Presumably the writer must have sat reading [as I did] the page after page of non-'African' examination 'winners' and has allowed a latent rage to whiplash through his writing. One senses the irony in the use of the word 'African': the exclusiveness that is the latent hallmark of the counter-racist cycle that we are moving through presently, and I regret that this sense of self-hatred motivating the tone of the article is so harsh. Primarily his/her tone does a great disservice to the vast majority of real winners in the examination: the plus minus 320,000 so-called 'African' kids who passed the exam-The first generation of freedom's children to have been allowed to prepare for the matric all the way from grade one..
There was a time when so called 'Afrikaner white' kids were excoriated because they were outnumbered by the Anglo's and other hated minority kids in the hit parades of winners back in the fifties and sixties. Eventually the annual 'Hot shot' page in the annual Star newspaper edition of the results [which as you know can cost up to fifty bucks a copy in some outlying parts of the province] began to represent almost disproportionately the so-called Afrikaner demographic in the results.
The same will happen in the future with so-called African kids, subject to a couple of caveats which may mar the result- may, not will. Nonetheless if we ignore them they wont go away.
The first caveat is that there are hordes of clever, sharp, intuitive and hungry so-called 'African' kids in our schools. However far too many will not stay the journey- How many so-called 'African' kids finished in 2006 out of the number that started in 1995, twelve years ago? That as Mr Levitt would have it is the real question. How many of our half- starved, intellectually under-nourished, work ethic deprived, under resourced, dysfunctional family structured learners made it to the final leg out of the huge number of starters. Was it 320,000 out of three million? I suspect the answer if anyone is capable of accessing it will be disappointing beyond belief and the editor's due apology to the vast mass of the 66,6% 'passees' who are demographically representative of his chosen group is more than due: for those who got through are the toughest of the tough and will go far in life.
A second caveat would be regarding motivation and incentives. Mr Steven Levitt whose book Freakonomics was gifted to me over Christmas has proved hugely entertaining. Mr Levitt is an economist who mines data with surprising outcomes. He mines micro data and proposes ideas that are astounding and can find the data to reinforce an hypothesis and turn it into a dramatically [often uncomfortable] revealing theory.
Mr Levitt's hidden strength is that he operates in an environment where information is accessible whereas our circumstances are slightly more obdurate. So at this stage we can ask the question and pose it with some sub-sets of questions.It is doubtful that we can get answers. Mr Levitt's concern is always with that of incentives, and how they prompt action or inaction..
Does the growing real state of discrimination against so called 'white' children, that was the subject of a balloon release demonstration by hundreds of so-called 'white' matriculants on the Day of the Vow last year in Tshwane, have a distorting effect on the outcomes of the exams by altering the incentive structures we traditionally associate with the pursuit of excellence?
Real or imagined discrimination is occurring on a no longer so-covert basis and therefore for many formerly advantaged kids the only way to get higher education if your family is cash strapped is through being the absolute best there is at something.
Conversely every dark kid who has grown up in the school system over the past decade knows that they don't have to do as well as the so-called whiteys to get trophies [assuming of course that they are in the declining proportions of schools that have any so-called white kids in them, at all]. Everyone has [regrettably] become accustomed to giving the first prize all too often to guys who came somewhere lower down in the pecking order, where they may have been first among the previously dispossessed. There is always a universal sigh of relief when, as frequently does occur, the best person is also the 'right' person. All too often though covert acts of 'fairness', prompted by the new demands for redress, when tagged on to the old liberation before education ethic, have possibly created a new non-work ethic for an increasingly visible group. [I apologise to my more sensitive readers for proposing a most insensitive albeit real topic]
It could be that the majority, new, ruling class are experiencing on mass the core problem that affected the old 'white' education system. The proliferation of non-functional so-called 'white' kids in the formerly 'privileged' school system was so high by the 1980's that embarrassed education authorities introduced a third class level of 'matric' [called lower grade] so that so many of those who knew they were going to get a 'free ride' because they were part of the 'ruling' elite could pretend that they 'had' a matric. [The system 'worked' by the way- very few citizens are aware of the differences between the various classes of matric- unlike employers who are most aware all too frequently, often after having learned the hard way but the military got the matriculants they craved.] It has now been done away with-one reason why the pass rate now seems so much lower than then, when you more or less had to apply in writing to fail the examination.
Frankly, my impression, comparing the matric papers that my youngest daughter wrote and has just passed now in 2006, with some old papers that I found, written by my eldest daughter in Matric '97, is that the standard of performance required now seems much tougher than it was then, notwithstanding the blather from the traditionalists. In other words a huge number of so-called 'African' children could well have passed a tougher exam than would have been written in the past when they weren't allowed to write it. And they should have had credit for it instead of some whine about how there weren't enough of the right darkies in the top end of the 'hit parade'.
I think that the editorial writer in the City Press misses the real issue from the exams, in his disingenuous rumination over the absence of smiling happy so-called 'African' faces from the top table. He dismissively discards the declining pass rate- and that is a real problem; one that hides what may be something even more serious..
A declining pass rate implies various things: It could be that the attention formerly given to matriculants [generally] is, possibly, losing focus. Teachers/educators [or to give them their new name: classroom managers] are so caught up with the avalanche of paper being thrust their way that the kids are just supposed to learn for themselves, which 66.6% have obviously been doing: but that doesn't happen without motivation.
There are persistent reports in the press of unrest conditions in large numbers of schools. Head teachers have lost their hire and fire authority, and work conditions in many schools are below par. There is also not much that can be done to drive a worker employed by head office and imposed on one. In fact according to press reports in the Daily Sun, a number of school heads have committed suicide this past year in despair over the mess they had chosen for their careers. School murders have hit the headlines more frequently this past year than in times past- school unrest is on a rising curve it seems. And the pass rate is in decline. The powerful message to all too many kids over the past decade has been that only schmucks are swots and getting ahead has more to do with who you know, and are: than with what you know or how clever you are. The point is made so often that it has become a cliché that connections will always trump skill, knowledge and, definitely, hard work.
Part of the [valid] mythmaking of the Apartheid years concerned the alleged thirst of so-called 'African' children for knowledge. The great game referred to in my letter to the Star of the 16th February 1990, [when the subject matter of the post matric editorial was the same cliché that we have just had from the editor of City press in 2006,] was that one called 'Liberation before education'. So then you went to school and caused chaos.
Could it be that too many of our young lads have a liberation ethic [which, remember, was deliberately the opposite of work ethic?] I have met many young so-called 'African' students over the past years who tell me they are despised and spat upon in traditional working class residential neighbourhoods for being 'model C kids', 'coconuts' black on the outside and white on the inside, trying to be clever like a 'whitey'. Has the past come in to play catch up, in a way we didn't anticipate?
Perhaps the season for this game has not run its course. Perhaps there are many whose eyes were opened by that campaign that have never seen fit to return to that immense and so-discredited 'hard work' ethic so beloved of our mythmakers.. And it was hard work- When I observed the amount of input my own child put in last year to get the results she got I am so glad for her sake that its over. Perhaps Ms Winfrey's new school for deserving so-called 'black' girls will pave the way to so-called 'African' success on the Hit parade in a future annual Star review of results.
In his obsession with racial balance the City Press editor didn't notice, did he/she, that not only were so-called 'African' children disproportionately under-represented on the Hit Parade, according to their level of demographic distribution, but that there were also far fewer boys up there than girls. Has anyone analysed the gap in results to establish whether the declining performance from a high of 73% in 03 to the present 66.6% [pass rate] in 06 results from fewer and fewer Boys making the final cut- I would suggest this to be possible. I also suspect that we may be more than disturbed by what we find out
Cheers.
May your 007 be shaken, stirred and congenially cool.
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