Rescue Me

According to the press there is a National Education Recovery campaign under way. Apparently the two weeks that the teachers were on strike a few weeks back had such serious repercussions that they have called for a mass scale mobilisation resources [otherwise not made readily available] to save millions of kids who are going to suffer irreparable harm without it. So welcome to the National [rescue me] Recovery Plan.

Before we proceed It’s well to remember that it has become routine now for a number of years for dedicated educators [P.K.A. teachers ] to devote chunks of their mid-year break to tutor their “learners” in the fine art of passing the matric exam. It has also been common cause for years now too that the various print media forms publish material prepared by the monopolistic Learning Channel organisation related to Matric preparation, now often extended to cover other grades as well, as the OBE [Outcomes Based Education] policy becomes more and more entrenched.

For those who’ve forgotten [or never knew] this years Matric crop is the last under the “old” system. In practice though, this year’s Matrics will have done much of their “Learning” over the past twelve years according to the new system simply due to the fact that few of their “educators” exclusively “facilitate” Matrics [as grade 12’s in SA are universally called notwithstanding current disapproval.] and for most human beings behaviour is not indivisible: meaning that most people are not like professional actors who can change skins at the click of a finger.

Listening to that fellow Hindle, the main guy in the edu system waffling away in his usual florid style, rationalising the National Education Recovery strategy, one would imagine that a fortnight’s break from learning will result in a complete collapse of this years matric results [When the 12th grade kids write their final National school leaving examination].

One wonders whether he even realises how his position alters with euphemistic certainty as he fine-tunes it at each turn. Along with Minister, Mrs Fraser-Moleketi, who handled the recent national strike negotiations for the government, he manages to sound like the living embodiment of Uriah Heep no reference to a great Rock group intended] playing the Vicar of Bray.

And I say, this headline that we have a: National “Rescue” campaign, sounds like bullshit.

Is Hindle playing politics in an attempt to intimidate the main “educators” union? Or is his campaign part of a National, let us “diss” teachers as usual… treat them with the contempt they seem to deserve. He seems to imply: that because they didn’t do their jobs for two weeks they didn't do their jobs at all.

Bear in mind that they didn't do their jobs for two weeks, because they wanted to make a point.

The money they are paid for doing this arduous, and often dangerous work, is insufficient for survival. They had to tell the country that the decision to enter this field of employment, which for many was the only choice they were permitted at the time they had to make it, was a flawed decision.

They needed to draw attention to their plight, since no one seemed to be listening to reason [Some years back teachers actually paid for their own salary increases by taking a lien on their pension fund to fund the increase. That is a profound indication of the level of contempt with those who choose the financially ruinous route of becoming an educator are treated by a society focussed exclusively on material gain.].

Anyway: to hark back to the main point of this blog.

Consider that for a decade or more now we have been running this “new” system of education called Outcomes Based. This was not a system chosen by the “educator” but rather a system imposed on the educator and the “System” by a gang of, mostly, left wing female “educationists” [not the same word not even though it sounds similar… the first is a “worker”; the other is someone who may never have spent more than a few hours in a classroom… at the “chalkface” as they say].

The flaws in this system are terrifying, notwithstanding that it has many excellent features. In the same way that the meltdown in Zimbabwe has been an insidious process over the past seven years, punctuated with classic denial from all the newly “uplifted”, the ‘mass’ section of the broader “learner” class in RSA is growing up absurder than Mr Illich* ever imagined. [* Growing up absurd. Ivan Illich.].

Fortunately this is the last year that kids have to use the new system to demonstrate knowledge gained and retained, of information taught according to the “old” rules. From next year the new, many say, “dumbed down”, course work applies; and everyone should do wonderfully well, since they hardly have to remember anything much, other than how to evaluate the problem of HIV Aids: from multiple perspectives.

Cynicism aside: According to this new OBE system all the kids in school are supposed to be learning how to “learn for themselves”. In other words the whole expensive shebang is geared to providing the emerging generation with the skills to go and do their own thing. And given how sharp they all seem to be with cellphones computers facebook n all it seems to have credence. As Nietzsche so preciently observed way back... "They no longer are interested in those things that we, the educated amongst us, are interested in."

This past weekend saw the second programme on the renowned “Carte Blanche TV series [ on the TV station M Net broadcasting on TV to Africa] in the past year devoted to the business of cellphone violence in schools. Cellphone violence: a process whereby kids beat up on other kids [at school] while third parties film the action on their cellphones [which, note, they all use with fluid facility even though learning how to use them has never been in the school curriculum].

The amount of un-filmed violence is that part of the iceberg we aren’t seeing. A couple of dozen kids have been murdered at school this year and so have a fair parcel of, now former, educators.

So: remember that the specific two weeks of the National teachers strike took place at the end of the term. This is a time when most schools were allegedly supposed to be writing exams [now known as “summative assessments” ] even though Mr Hindle lapsed mostly back into old habits, using the old reference: “exam”: thereby demonstrating Ely's dictum: People don't change.

In other words in most schools when the kids write ‘exams’ they only go to school on those days that they write and do little in the way of formal “learning” . Further, nogal, the darlings are supposed to have “learned” how to “learn” by themselves anyway: this being the point of the new system.

Now all of a sudden at least two provinces have unilaterally cut the annual mid-year break in half so that kids can “catch up” and to hell with those who were going on holiday… reflecting perhaps a cynical attitude that poor kids don’t go anywhere for their holidays. [Poor kids in particular, since they are presumably the priority target here] … Poor kids don’t get to go visit auntie for the holidays or pop off to some rural place where aged grandparents eke out a poverty drenched, yet romantic existence. Never mind that this impromptu process will discriminate unfairly [double unfair then] against those kids/teachers/parents who did opt to go somewhere for a bit of family time together. Will there be a catch up process for the kids who miss the school holiday catch up process? Hello! Piss on the legs of those who actually plan their lives with a bit more care than the education department seems to demonstrate here.

The Education authorities can hardly have it both ways can they? Either they [the kids] have been learning how to learn at huge expense and time consuming, incoherent retraining of teachers [sorry: “educators”] or they haven’t… From the Matric perspective,this time of the year in the twelfth grade is not the time when any other than the most retrograde education kollective should be doing “new stuff” they should be in revision mode for the most part. The year is effectively over by June, and most experienced educators have effectively covered the syllabus, with maybe a few delicate parts left over for last, and are now in refresh mode.

How can two weeks of limited learning exposure cause a national crisis?

What is this suggesting about the other, plus minus, 440 weeks of learning, from grade 1? Are the education authorities desperately attempting to prove that they deserve the 25% of national budget that is allocated for preparing the next generation to run the whole show? Are they seeing a pending a catastrophe that the rest of us can't see?

This fat budget is providing wonderful revenue streams to those who publish increasingly content stripped “games” books, to the increasingly knowledge impoverished school system. To call most of the formal learning facilitative material being supplied to “educators” these days’ textbooks is to radically deconstruct the meaning of Text. Other beneficiaries are television producers and hopefully, eventually, online content providers.

What’s left over provides only a pittance to those who do the real work of actually constructing content in the classroom. [For those who don’t know: in the past the textbook supplied the content and the “educator” provided the “games”. Now, for those who are “wired”, Google and Wikipedia provide the content: and the Publishing houses supply the games… ] Those Marxian oriented blog readers here might reasonably argue that the new system serves the corporatocracy as much as it supports the aspirant “learner”. The worker in this case has become as commoditised as any other button pusher.

In theory one no longer needs “Educators”. Rather, one needs only a pool of classroom managers. well that's is the theory, frequently denied by those who commoditised the workforce.

One could argue that like the other grandiose schemes on which we have embarked over the past decade: viz: the arms deal, the 2010 adventure: to mention but two, valuable resources have been diverted from socially productive uses to pander to a range of partially relevant sub-texts. We are again starving the future to arrive at the present when the decision taken then has its toll now in the time we thought would never come: in this “winter of our discontent”.

So in summary: Either the kids have learned their lessons over their eleven and a half years at school and the system is working; or the view from the top is screaming out that they haven’t, and a lot of people need to cover their backsides.

It looks therefore as though the Education Department, protagonists of the new order are using some misdirection in the form of a widely broadcast “National rescue effort” to distract us, before the awful truth emerges… That perhaps their expensive facelift on the learning process is an ongoing present failure.

The Blogospherian.