Duct tape solutions will not solve education crisis

IN one of the many reruns of DSTV’s Come Dine with Me South Africa, the most breathtaking display of ignorance, or arrogance, was posited by a young attorney from Cape Town.

Feeling put out by the older contestants sharing of interesting facts, the young lawyer claimed “General knowledge is obsolete. If I want to know something I just Google it.” I wonder how she passed her exams. Are we then to assume, judging by that statement, that many of the youth have brains which are empty vessels, which may very well wither and die from lack of exercise, because there is a device which thinks for them?Not for all of us though. Most of us are required to think and have the basic tools to make knowledge accessible in old fashioned ways, through books and teachers.

Such is the conundrum for a higher education task team which is considering the possibility of adding a fourth year to three-year degrees and diplomas.

This is seen as a solution to the high rate of university drop outs. A recent report stated that more than half of South African university students fail to complete their studies and only a quarter of students who complete their degrees do so in three years.

The report was released in Durban this week by the Council on Higher Education. It pushed for a restructuring of the undergraduate curriculum as a cost effective way of bridging the discrepancy between the requirements and expectations of tertiary institutions and the level of preparedness of the school leaver.

The idea undoubtedly has merit, particularly for students from under performing and under resourced schools. It could possibly put all students on the same footing without the disadvantage of having attended a poor school.

But this is tackling the symptoms of a bad education system rather than tackling the root cause of the problems.

Schools are under resourced, text books are not delivered, we get excited at a 70 per cent matric pass rate, we applaud mediocrity.

Why should we be spending taxpayers money on an extra year of university when the root of the problem is deeply imbedded in Grade 1 and, possibly, before that.

Studies have shown that children who attend pre-school are better equipped for the demands of formal education and fare better than children who have no early childhood education. We cannot fix our appalling failure rate in matric and at tertiary level by simply adding another year to a degree or diploma course. The time for duct tape solutions is over.

So long as education is politicised, so long as children are learning under trees, in crumbling classrooms without even a blackboard, so long as children are denied text books because somewhere someone is getting a pay off, so long as children are being taught by unqualified teachers and teachers with little interest, our education system will remain abysmal.

Unlike the young attorney and her obsolete general knowledge and her privileged access to Google, we need to get back to basics, to dig out the rot and start again – at the beginning.