We have just celebrated 47 years of the South African youth’s revolution against inferior education. The youth then were rejecting any attempt by the apartheid regime to subject them to a form of education that would not make them fit for purpose. The greatest honour we can bestow on them is to make quality education accessible to the current generation.
Accordingly, any society that ignores the impact of its education system on its own people, does so at its own peril. It is against this background that in the midst of all the fanfare associated with matric results every year, I couldn’t help but ask whether a matric certificate in this current form is all that our education system can reward twelve years of learning with?
What does it really mean to have a matric certificate in SA today? Is matric a school credit that can be converted into a learner’s material, socio-economic, political and spiritual needs? If not, why not? A useful schooling system should use the 12 years that learners spend within it to prepare them for the real world with a practical working knowledge on how to navigate their ways through various intricacies of the global networks.
If school years can be used to teach learners how to unleash their full potential by empowering them with practical working knowledge of their minds, it will surely lend more credence to the much-celebrated matric results.
Our education system leaves it too late before it starts preparing learners for the real world. The assertion that real preparations for meaningful role-playing in society should only happen at institutions of higher learning is risky, dangerous and counterproductive.
Matric as an exit point from the twelve-year schooling system should be presenting to society a person capable of rendering some form of useful service to society or at least to himself/herself. To achieve this objective, there must be a great deal of coherence in terms of curriculum throughout the systems from early childhood development to matric.
A coordinated curriculum should put emphasis on the previous grades work while focusing on the present to get learners ready for the next grade. The objectives of basic education must be upgraded to include accumulation of measurable, practical and working knowledge by learners by the time they exit the system.
Education should present learners with an opportunity to move from being good to greatness and to be a master in their subjects of choice. Only a coherent curriculum across the grades in the system will achieve that. Matric results should reflect the accumulative knowledge of a learner acquired over a twelve-year period of formal learning.
Matric should be a very important landmark in the stages of our education system. To give it more meaning this landmark must not only be marked by a certificate but by the bearer’s capacity to render some form of useful service to society. In the light of skyrocketing unemployment rate, especially among the youth, is it not about time that we transform our basic education system so that our youths can exit it with skills and applicable knowledge to participate meaningfully in society? What adds insult to injury is that even after graduating with a degree or a diploma our youth is still deemed not ready for the market.
My conclusion is that our education system is so incoherent that one can be put through it for fifteen solid years and still come out unprepared for the market. Surely the blame can’t be put on the learners. There must be something wrong with the system itself. The disjuncture between early childhood development, basic education, higher education and the market calls for an urgent public and private sector intervention if we are to lend credence to celebrating our education at any stage, including matric.
• Mukhwa is an educator and a master of education research candidate at Wits University.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.