With Youth Month coming to an end this week, it is important to revisit the crucial issue of how we can provide the most appropriate system of education, one that would enable young people to live up to their best potential.
As things stand, our education regime is theoretically anchored to produce service workers who can administer organisations and systems. A large part of this labour entails communications and commercial exchange over a technologically driven process.
This type of economy and the education system that supports its existence has delivered high rates of unemployment, inequality and indebtedness in our context. A majority of young people are alienated from this kind of society and it has also produced a disengaged citizenship divided by toxic elitism.
In essence, we have been pushed to become a consumer society whose only purpose is to save, spend, rent, and borrow. This activity is done every 30 days by both the social grant recipient and wage earner until retirement or death.
This kind of life is miserable, sad, and needs to be changed. The required shift will begin with reimagining how we prepare our youth for the working world of adulthood where they can get to participate in it with purpose.
SA needs a productive economy that will address its basic needs and sells its output to the rest of the continent and the world at massive scales and at competitive prices. Our climate and geographic location positions our production at an advantage to generate the necessary infrastructure required to connect with these markets.
Our population demographics show that the majority in SA is below the age of 35 and most of them are at home with little to no opportunity for training, education and employment.
These characteristics should be viewed as opportunities, not problems.
The first opportunity is that we have all the ingredients necessary to start opening community colleges and training hubs in our townships and other impoverished areas of our country that would equip people with the latest industrial skills they require to become small-scale productive entrepreneurs.
This would involve the capacitation of community members with technical skills and “know-how” to do productive and maintenance work for their own growth, development and pride. Such skills range from small business management, farming, literacy, design, building, painting, plumbing, dining, and creative arts – to name a few.
This category of community training would involve the youth and the adult population that does not get the opportunity to go through the formal structures of theoretical education.
The different departments of government responsible for education and training including the sector authorities, public institutions, and private industry should create the necessary funding model to make this category of development sustainable and effective to achieve our social transformation targets.
This kind of community work is highly needed in SA especially in our times where we have a very limited system of formal higher education and training that caters to less than 1-million citizens.
More than 10-million young people are outside institutions of higher learning and they require alternative routes for training and opportunities to begin making a living.
This community training regime should also activate the existing traditional institutions of higher learning such as universities and TVET colleges to craft strategic partnerships with community colleges to exchange capacity for the delivery of mass education and training.
In particular, this would require universities that are former technikons to revitalise their technical traditions to support industry players and create productive collaborations that culminate in the revival of our industrialisation plans.
Another avenue to exploit to drive this path of development is to revisit our international economic agreements with the SADC and BRICS community to channel investments towards these community programmes for the purpose of repositioning SA as a hub of industrialisation within the geopolitical landscape of the Global South.
These kinds of developmental approaches to our current challenges of youth hopelessness should invite the leadership of the education sector to begin stretching its mandate to create new community-wide partnerships to activate and expand access to training opportunities for mass participation.
This approach is supposed to be the founding principle of public education and training in a democratic society that has a constitutional mandate to drive economic transformation.
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