Sky is not the limit

EDITOR – The ward 97 committee has various portfolios related to the sciences and one is job creation and skills development and another is sports, arts and culture and I am writing to create an awareness not only with the members of the committee but also to draw comment from parents and educators.

We seem to have good sports persons emerging from Toti and we are sincerely proud and elated with their achievements but how about Toti and surrounds being able to proudly push our chests out by delivering astrophysicists, engineers and technicians for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in Sutherland in the Cape? Our ward is surrounded with industry that can come on board with an introduction to science in practise.

Alike to the many political leaders who emerged from Adams Mission, eManzimtoti can become a hub for pupils from all over the country to prepare our youth for the science disciplines. We often say let’s put Toti on the map when many of us cannot even read a map. Take time to read the following, it is for the sake of our ward.

Until we link science to the economy in South Africa, learners will have no enthusiasm to enter this vast field of opportunities. Not only can personal prosperity be advanced through science but the economy as a whole and even the micro-economy of ward 97 can benefit. During the progress of the space age in the second half of the previous century, the USA GDP soared steadily every decade until they cut down on their space programme budget. Older men that are innovators and inventors today once stared up into the night skies to see the Sputnik satellite circumnavigate our cosmic doorstep.

Academic ability should not be the only consideration when attracting scholars to include science and math as their subjects. Those who are supposedly academically impaired very often actually only lack motivation for the disciplines. We need to create frontiers for our children that will make them curious and attract them to opportunities to innovate and invent. Our children must not be limited to knowledge by making them believe the earth is only 6,000 years old. No, humans and dinosaurs did not exist together, nor is evolution a religion. We should not tell children they must study maths and science because we need engineers in the motor industry to ensure our cars run well. That is not a frontier but a call for sustaining the present. Tell a child that we need engineers for the motor industry because one day cars must be able to hover above freeways to accommodate more traffic. That thought will entice and draw them to the science textbooks with a new vision.

As far as the benefits to the economy is concerned, just take the cell phone industries’ employment and money it generates by continually improving phone devices which started as brick size and now can fit into a tight pocket of a pair of denims. Parents, when little Mary or Johnny takes your watch apart or one surprises you by showing you the motherboard of your cell phone, remember by getting mad at them, you may be depriving humankind of some great future invention to make life easier for all on the planet. Someone once said we used to walk on all fours and gradually progressed to upright beings and now we can look to the skies.

TOTI FIRST

Frank Horn

Ward 97