Education: the acid test cometh.

I do understand obsession. For instance it is about half three in the morning and I have got out of a warm bed and moved to a cold room to write this. Well technically I typed this. Had I written it, then I would have had to type it… Technically I rise at three to practice my typing. If that isn’t a form of obsession then what is?

Ja, well, no fine… as we like to say here at the southern tip of the Azanian Konfederacy [emerging] in Afrika. Do we still practise human sacrifice in the interests of ideological purity? Is this our favourite obsession? What is the acid test of our obsessions? What is the acid test for our prime obsession the new education system... our path to the future.

Twice this week my employers, at the place where I have had a temporary, part-time job for the past decade, have sent me, and colleagues, to undergo re-education training at the hands of various exponents of the new education system [in RSA].

In the first day’s session an enthusiastic middle-aged woman enjoined us against ever using the word “Teach” to describe what we do, because the term implies something that fails to communicate, she said. “I facilitate learning”…This, she said, should be our watchword.

The second presenter person, in a later session used the word ‘teach’ promiscuously; as though desperately keen to be “our mate”. She never used the word “facilitate” at all; notwithstanding tht she was a more senior version of the person from the first session, and was allegedly a prime motivator of the “no teach” lobby.

And she needed to be our mate as she peppered us with a , frankly, neurotic obsession with the minutiae of the many tagged abbreviations, into which all our new education formula is being systematised: our new catechism. “We are concerned with what comes out” at the end of the process,” she said, “and to assure ourselves of the “correct” ‘outcome’, we make certain that every step in the process is documented, validated, current, fair and transparent”. No child will ever again be ignominiously humiliated by getting “marks” that are uncomplimentary. [except of course that human beings have an infinite capacity for self-humiliation, .No one fail anymore, which is true for there is no such thing as failure; there are simply opportunities to improve one’s performance. I suspect the phrase “NOT YET COMPETENT” will ring as grotesquely though as any other form of negative stroke.]

I found myself thinking of Nietzsche who railed against “Systematisers”: I wondered how many of those former “teachers” now reduced to Laity with a vested interest in their salaries will simply preach a new religion; follow it blindly: not knowing where they go. The litany of abbreviations: El oh, See oh, Dee oh et al, become a mantra to bond our journey.

Both ladies though were entertaining, committed and informative; and I benefited from both my sessions on the “other side” of the desk this week; and know that I shall be a more effective mediator in the learning process than I was previously. Well in theory anyway. Am I a more effective educator because I have practiced my catechism? Maybe… we shall see.

In many ways, for me, the new system is an affirmation of what I have always practiced, with varying levels of success over forty years. I have generally managed to do it though with a minimum of paperwork, I know what destination we want to reach and act as guide to the humans in my care: over forty years I have worked in Boardrooms at one end of the human spectrum and and grade fours at another end.

For the past twelve years or so I have taken Grade twelve students on their journey to discovery and liberation from the first round. No student of mine has ever dopped the final. I seldom either get or give A’s. My responsibility is to act as tour guide making sure you get to see all the sights; and seeing to it that no one is lost along the way [ie no one ‘dops’].

How you choose to enjoy the trip is up to you and those few who gained the ultimate accolade were self-driven to the point of obsession… which is how it is when striving for excellence.

As to the presentation of an obsessive litany of I’s that must be crossed and T’s that must be dotted, for every task or moment of time I spend in the classroom, I believe I have stared into the face of madness and been found wanting.

I have commented at large over the past few years about the emerging new education system and how, notwithstanding its apparent liberation context it succeeds even more brilliantly than the Apartheid system did, in discrimination on a fairly magnanimous, if covert, scale.

Specifically it discriminates against those without access to vast screeds of information. I have noted again and again, how, many of the different presenters of the many course that I have attended over the years,[not to mention the occasional dysfunctional so-called “cluster meeting”, and this that and the other “meeting”], have smugly confirmed that the new system discriminates against males and male achievement. There is increasing evidence, Globally, of males falling behind females in the new measures of achievement, since this new education system is part of a global change to the management of the learning process… It may even be a new and more subtle form of intellectual colonisation. .

By the end of this decade it would be safe to assume a preponderance of female undergraduates in most, if not all of the world’s most critical centres of knowledge, in both developing and developed countries. As an educator and father of two daughters who have both been national sporting champions, I have no objection to the empowerment of females. I am though, not convinced, that this system will do anything more than empower upwardly mobile middle-class girls at the expense of almost the entire rest of society.

It also bothers me that notwithstanding these changes, which are relatively new for us but are long established in other places, it is still boys who know how to use computers and other related techno-things. That seems to be where the action is these days. It also appears that many more boys than girls are tuned into the new technology, than actually study the stuff formally in the system. I do wonder whether these upwardly mobile middle-class girls who are the major beneficiaries of the new system will truly revel in becoming the corporate bureaucrats they are being trained to become.

Of course I don’t see that this is some kind of conspiracy, simply an unintended outcome of a dubious system that has become so bogged down in the minutiae of neurotic control that the indicators currently seem to re-affirm the old cliché that mass education is an oxymoron.

Males are by nature chaotic and prone to procrastination. [Well that is the new stereotype, which, just because it applies to me doesn’t necessarily mean it can be a generalisation… after all, men invented accountancy]. Millennia of male domination hands down a mantle of action oriented achievement. Women on the other hand, along with those who were downtrodden for reasons other than gender have yet to taste the fruits of an achieving liberation, and so have constructed an obsession out of process, in a determined effort to ensure democratic transparency and hence, it is believed, success.

The jury is “out”, as they say, on this new system. The new culture of “open ended learning” is in play. For those citizens who are condemned by the nature of our market determined society to remain forever commoditised, and inherently irrelevant to an acquisitive society, the new system is perfect. It demands little and rewards trivia sufficiently to be called competent… it is only later that they all realise that they were somehow shortchanged.

For the rest “open ended learning” as the new “childhood-bureaucratisation-processor system” has now become, is ultimately a formula for frivolously frittering away the “learning” experience into an alliteration of tightly bound headings. Ultimately, it seems, centuries of co-existing in a male dominant, and in our case specifically so-called, white male dominant, society has generated a chain of hand-me-down, mediated performance behaviour patterns, amongst those who were formerly dispossessed. This chain of behaviours was always rooted in impotence. This means that “they” were the action people and “we” talked endlessly about our condition: for centuries in fact. And now “we” are in charge and “we” are doing things “our” way and you had better agree that we are right, or….

Many, who are watching this new education process from the more abstracted position of community stakeholder, share my own concerns about the trivialisation of content that is inherent in the new education programme. The argument we are given is that information changes so rapidly today compared to the past, that learning any “facts” is inherently pointless. What is needed is the skill to find the most current “facts”: and that this is what ‘they’ [the kids] must learn…

This is a plausible argument and is superficially true. That is why the current freak out over the use of Google and Wikapedia and plagiarism by schoolkids downloading tons of material to cut n paste into their school projects is most hysterically funny…. there is this entertaining sense of … “That is not what we meant… at all.”

The new system seeks to promote a culture of critical thinking about things while inherently acknowledging that critical thinking is only one form of knowledge, or intelligence, and a fair system must recognise the validity of other forms of intelligence. Thus it also sets much store by kooperative learning [group work for the unitiated]. Nonetheless the accounting equation, for instance, remains the accounting equation no matter how creatively the accounts are interpreted. The “economic problem” remains constant no matter how much we fudge over the process of: supply versus demand. And I am equally sure that for the foreseeable future E will continue to equal MC squared. As many an old cliché affirms, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. The contrary argument is that you don’t need to know something you can go and look up in a minute, although it may have been important in those days when knowledge was scarce and diffuse.

However the proof is in the ultimate product. The bridge shouldn’t fall down when people cross it for the first time. We don’t want to buy products that have been imperfectly mediated through an open-ended process. We want to know that the dog food is safe for our pets, that the fertiliser that we put on our pineapples wont contain enough cadmium to make us all radioactive, that the toothpaste we put in our children’s mouths wont sear their gums and rot their teeth. In the same way we want an education system that guarantees that we will emerge smarter than our cellphones, which is the intention of this new system, well, for it’s best proponents anyway: as it has always been.

In business there is a measurement instrument called the “acid test ratio” whereby an enterprise routinely measures its state of solvency. It is also now fashionable in business to promote the idea of a Social bottom line. In the same way this new system has two acid test ratios. The first one, the social bottom line one suggests that the system is veering towards bankruptcy… The school drop-out rate is alarming and, allegedly, is rising. I say allegedly because the Education authorities seem unable or unwilling to supply current and past statistics… We have to assume that they consider the present level of drop-outs to be acceptable…. In the same way that a million casualties a day was considered “acceptable” during World War 1.

So for the second acid-test ratio … the one that will point towards future profitability or not…

2008 will be the first year that the first generation of kids educated under the new system will write their University entrance examination. This means that the acid test for the new system arrives in 2009. In that year the first products of the new system will start their first year at the University of their Choice, outside the benevolent control of the nurturing school system. Those who have been there know that the hallmark of a great university is “think or swallow water”. The first year failure rate at most of the country’s universities is legendary. Changing this is the real acid-test.

The theory behind this hugely expensive re-engineered system is that the country needs to produce people who can creatively interact with the new 21st century age and its labour needs. In other words it is intended that the new entrants into University will perform more effectively at what the university wants, than they did under the past system [which was admittedly seriously flawed]. The unstated and sad truth is that a modern society needs only about five percent of it’s school leavers to be competent enough to think … the rest must be like always … dutiful consumers and, perhaps, critical voters.

Not only has this new system been expensive, it has been created at an equally huge, barely acknowledged toll in human resources, a toll that ranges from the massive school drop-out rate, about which we are in equally massive denial, to the alleged fact that five “teachers” leave the system for every new “educator” entering, [something else we are in denial about] while in-between a rising number of people are being brutalised and murdered in the schoolyards. We are also in denial about this.

In addition from the private sector standpoint there are huge competition issues that are being blandly ignored in an ethical shakedown that is imposed on so-called “Independent schools”. These issues are inherent in the collusive nature of the enforced collaboration demanded by the so-called cluster moderation system, whereby I inspect how your business [read: expensive private school] does things; and you inspect how mine does.

If the major players in the Cement industry [for instance], or the automotive industry, or banks were to collude at even one percent of the level expected of the so-called Independent [read private] school system they could expect to face action from the, admittedly somewhat toothless, Competition Tribunal.

Presently this inherently anti-competitive collusion is being fudged over by means that may later be seen as unethical by some of the better-endowed participants, especially those that retain some level of intellectual rigour. [In fact they probably already think it unethical but are being press ganged into compliance by an aggressive State apparatus determined to assure that no competing system will spoil their game]. There are also an overwhelming number of former civil servants who now work as “educators” in the mushrooming Independent [private sector] school system. For these the places where they work are simply schools and they see no conflict. However there is an inherent contradiction here between the demands of the control obsessed ‘socialist’ inclined architects of the OBE system, and the requirements of a market oriented private school sector.

But for all of these the acid test cometh

According to this new OBE education theory, the first year pass rate at the Universities should, in 2009, show a sharp upward rise, as a generation of kids who have been facilitated in thinking, and analysing, and researching skills will take to the rigour of a university education with glorious alacrity. This, not the ever-massaged final so-called “matric” examination results, will represent the true ‘acid test’ for the new system.

Should the first year pass rate rise, and continue to rise, then the system will pass muster. Should it continue to present its present problematic failure rate then we shall have reached a disturbing impasse. [One hears for instance that the current “not yet competent” rate in the half year Physics exams of a leading local university, for a particularly demanding programme populated by the crème of the cream of last years school leavers is running at 95%. This, together with the current downturn in the School leavers examinations, may be a temporary phenomenon as the kids “learning” the old ‘stuff’ are increasingly ‘Facilitated’ by ‘Teachers’ who have been re-educated; and so the kids lack the memory skills to remember all the stuff they used to have to remember to pass.and because they were so busy trying to remember trivia like formulas and principals and other ridiculous content they never learned to think.]

Should there, however, be no improvement in the first year failure rate [sorry that should read “not yet competent” rate’], then, for reasons of maintaining competitive advantage in a market place savagely competing for a declining market share, it may be necessary for many more [private sector] institutions to abandon the new system than have already done so.

I hope the socialists will be proved right and that the new system does what it promises, notwithstanding the present gloomy anecdotal prognosis. The alternatives are not cool, although they may be less bureaucratic.


See http://www.editred.com/nicholasjakari for more of NiK’s work.