OBE founders on 'Sub-Prime' meltdown

OBE founders on Sub-Prime meltdown
Weblog
17 November


I heard on the radio that the government was reviewing the idea of the outcomes based education [OBE] system that reaches its climax this year with the so-called Matric Exam in South Africa. This is the final exam that sets out to evaluate and assess the performance of 600,000 kids who have just finished what was to all intents and purposes a storm of learning. That is it assesses the quality of the 6 out of 20 kids who made it through the grid from grade 1 to grade 12 in order to find the 1 % who will become the kernels of tomorrows leadership cadres

I find I have mixed feelings. I am filled with admiration for the sheer volume of work that this years Matrics represent. At the same time I am reminded of that classic comedy movie if it’s Tuesday it must be Belgium. Then I see a potentially fatal flaw in this scheme of things. The new matric curriculum is rather like a smorgasbord dinner where the guests taste a little bit of everything, remember, perhaps, the odd stand out dish, and then collapse exhausted into a deep sleep… from which they awaken with post-binge amnesia, and remember almost nothing of the meal other than whether it was fun or not.

The main difference between the smorgasbord dinner and our new smorgasbord education process is that every mouthful is to be assessed in terms of whether it was competently chosen, selected, tasted, spat out or eaten, as my friend Bergie puts it, having been involved with the process since its inception: “Too much emphasis is placed on correct administration, instead of ensuring that the outcomes have actually been met.” I’m sure that the organisers of the system would say that correct administration would ensure correct outcomes: for most of the learners. We will soon find out.

The kids are known formally as Learners, because they are there to learn… preferably by themselves and/or by co operation with others in their groups, with guidance, and help from the class manager, which completely changes their job from what it was in, say 1971, or even 1993. Then the Teacher led the learning process. Now the ‘classroom outcomes mediator’ sets the journey and then follows it. This in itself is a transformational change so radical that most of our society is unaware of its progress. One thing for which little credit has been shown is that the new ‘teacher’ needs to know vastly more about their designated learning area [‘subject’: in old language] than most ‘old school’, inaptly named “teachers”, are able to deliver.

There are more fancy words like facilitation and mediation, which apply to what they do. These suggest a more hands off approach to the schooling process than we are familiar with in our popular mythology of the classroom. So a modern ‘teacher’ is like a big classroom monitor who also manages the process and extracts learning excellence from the young humans in their charge… [And still has to be a teacher in the old fashioned sense because that is what they do…]. It is a fascinating and truly inspirational journey.

In effect the kids should be left alone to puzzle through things and figure out what they mean. Anyway no matter how it goes the results will not show up for years and by the time they do there will be almost no one who remembers how it was when the system produced the kinds of skills and knowledge needed for the old society.

This system is supposed to produce the minds and skills needed to make a high tech 21st century society work and function and adapt to the range of changes that face us; from alternate fuel transformation and biotechnology, to the greening of the planet: and coping with those shifts in the planets alignment with the multiverse that have induced so-called climate change.

So for now this is the system we have got and the authority is going to have to learn how to achieve the outcomes with eighty percent less paperwork because the outcome if they don’t is that they will have no classroom managers by 2020. As it is South Africa’s schools are coping, with the help of an increasing number of well-trained Zimbabwean teachers who, ironically do not follow the OBE system.

Will it work… will it produce that 5 –10 percent of future leaders and separate out the dross that is doomed to go nowhere… and what about the super-dross, those who fell by the wayside. And what happens to them? How does this almost unbelievable expense, about a quarter of the national budget, help the 1,4 million kids who stopped being learner on the way from grade 1… and who have just vanished into a collectivist maw?

Right now, notwithstanding an unemployment rate that sits in the upper twenty percent range the economy is short of about a quarter million trained and skilled personnel in all walks from accountants to aircraft technicians, electricians, plumbers, teachers and medical workers. The rate of attrition outweighs the rate of replacement by a considerable margin. Curiously the shortages of labour have not resulted in higher wages in those categories, if anything wages have declined: but that is another story altogether not to mention that it is a puzzle.

After years of figuring it out I declare that this super-controlled, elitist oriented, OBE system is too complicated, too soon, to produce the desired result. I also accept that the model that it replaced was too awful to remember. The results we are about to be shown will be massaged to make them credible and we know that we [the world] face a global economic meltdown because of a universal desire to ignore reality in the face of the inevitability of a sub prime meltdown.

OBE is in fact foundering on a sub-prime meltdown as millions of kids abandon the system and wreak their unruly revenge. By the time we have figured that out it may well be too late to be useful. Perhaps the philanthropic Mr Shuttleworth, who’s efforts in the field of digital education have featured in the press recently, will find a way to automate the learning and assessment process and leave everyone time for the real learning that takes place in schools.

KISS… the word that means, “Keep it Simple… Stupid” applies here.