After all my moralising last week about cheating in exams, I got a nice solid kick up the butt...
THERE was an interesting correlation between headlines in the Johannesburg papers this week. The Star announced that the Education Bill would make all schools equal. Beeld announced that a journalist posing as a teacher had been able to obtain copies of the matric exam papers without ID or other checks.
Charming. In one fell swoop, sheer ineptness toppled my lofty idealism with the irrefutable fact that the only way that one can stay ahead in the current matric examinations is by cheating.
So the new equality means all schools have been reduced to the lowest common denominator. All pupils now suffer, not just those who are black.
It's difficult not to join in the chorus of outrage from most opposition parties. Faith in the integrity of the educational system is critical for so many aspects of our development as a nation.
Business, tertiary educational institutions, and anyone who takes a matric certificate on trust will not be able to do so with the current crop of school leavers.
Particularly hard-hit will be those who have set their sights on study overseas. For while our universities will be forced to toe the line and take our students at face value, foreign pillars of education will not be as forgiving.
Where does this mess originate? Whose fault is it? And how could it have been prevented?
The fact of the matter is that the structures left in place by apartheid education were skewed to begin with. Unequal allocation of resources has meant that for most students in our country, inferior education is still the order of the day.
The extent of the problem smacked me in the face last weekend when I tutored my baby brother in preparation for his matric examination in computers.
He had no syllabus to work towards. An understanding of exactly what one is required to know for the examination and the relative importance of the various topics was completely absent.
He had not been taught a large part of the material. A discordant set of photocopied notes had been provided, and he was asked to learn the material.
His teacher was not qualified to teach the subject. For the past year, they had been taught by a student teacher who had tried her damnedest, but had simply not studied most of what she had been told to teach.
Whatever he had been taught had no relevance to the real world. Computer science is based on maths and physics, but also requires philosophy and logic. For the most part, the teaching methods called for learning by rote.
The kid is neither stupid nor a slacker. He has just never been shown how what he was expected to learn was related to reality. For example, he was having great difficulty with arrays, a structure within a computer programme that consists of related information that is linked together, such as sets of numbers (1 to 100) together with letters (A-Z).
"Know how seats are numbered in a cinema?" I asked. Of course he did.
"An array keeps track of seats in the cinema. Each seat is a component identified by a letter and a number, like B-32."
He understood that.
He also understood the relevance of truth tables and inverted numbers when I showed him how a computer thinks. The tool? A diagram of two overlapping circles. Set theory from Std 1 maths.
"No one ever explained to me why we learnt that in class one, or how it is the same as my circuit diagrams," he said.
I went to a state aided school as a child. Visionaries in Durban's communities had seen fit to invest in our future by building schools and keeping standards high. The state provided some funds, but the community set the standards.
The state school my brother attends, built by the Nats in the dormitory town of Lenasia where all sense of community has been destroyed by uprooting under the Group Areas Act, is a production line.
That production line has to be destroyed. A complete ground-up redesign of our educational infrastructure has to be made.
But this process cannot be run by politicians. We should throw this open as a challenge to the finest minds in the world, then put the implementation out to tender and pay the bill.
The corvettes can be bought later.