Amazing things I learned at Fairmount School in Johannesburg

Over the last couple of weeks I've had reason to remember various things I have learned, and I'm quite amazed at how many of them I learned in Standard 1 (Grade 3) at Fairmount Government School in Johannesburg. I get the impression that it is now called Summerwood Primary School -- I'm not sure why or when the name changed, but I think it is the same place. 

This morning it was a discussion on English usage. Someone asked whether in English the word "camel" applied only to the two-humped Bactrian camel, and that the one-humped ones were not camels, but dromedaries, as they apparently are in French.

And my mind took me back to the Standard 1 classroom at Fairmount School, where Miss Armstrong (who became Mrs Legger) taught us that there were two kinds of camels: the dromedary camel with, with one hump, which was native to North Africa and Western Asia, and the Bactrian camel of Eastern Asia, which had two humps. But the word "camel" was used for both. 

I was only at Fairmount School for a year and a half, out of twelve years of school, but my most vivid memories of things I learned at school are from the time I spent at Fairmount.

I first went to Fairmount School in the spring of 1948, when we had just moved to a 5-acre smallholding in a place then called Sunningdale, though only a small part of it is still called Sunningdale today, and the part where we lived is now called something else. My father would take me to school in his car in the morning, and I would walk home after school in the afternoon. a walk of about a mile, mainly on a footpath through the veld, or a winding gravel track, which is now tarred and called Summer Way.

My memories of Fairmount mainly concern what Miss Armstrong taught. The only fellow-pupil whose name I can remember is a girl called Jennifer Foulis, who was a year or two older than me, and lived almost next door to the school. I sometimes went to her house and played with her and her brother John after school. I once invited her to come and play with me at my house, and her mother was horrified. It was quite out of the question. I asked why, and her mother said "Because she's a girl." It was quite OK for a boy of 8 to walk a mile over the veld to go home from school, but a girl of 9 or 10, no, not even, or perhaps especially not, when accompanied by a boy.

The Johannesburg municipal boundary was at Sandler Road, about 2 houses from the school, and beyond that was under the jurisdiction of Edenvale (our car had a TDL number plate). We had no mains electricity, and no telephone -- off-the-grid was easy in those days.

Other things I remember from Fairmount School -- the headmaster was E.E. Harrison. I once had to go to his office for not having completed my homework, and he beat me, the first time I experienced such a thing at school. He had a leather-covered cane that appeared to be broken, so held together with leather, so it acted as a kind of flail. The Vice Principal was a Mr van Schalkwyk. 

The school had four "houses" for the purpose of sporting competitions, named after birds: Penguins, Pelicans, Eagles and Cranes. I was rather disappointed to be allocated to the Penguins, as my favourite birds were eagles and sparrows.

Most of the things I remember learning at Fairmount had to do with subjects like Nature Study, Hygiene, and History. In history we learnt about cavemen, pyramids in Egypt and the growth of civilisation in Egypt and Mesopotamia. We also learned stuff from different periods like the invention of safety matches, and at one point I had a mental image of cavemen running around with unsafe matches in their pockets.

In Nature Study we learned not only about one-humped and two-humped camels, but also about monocotyledonous seeds, like mealies, and dicotyledonous seeds, like beans, which we put in damp cotton wool to watch them sprout. Looking back, I think it was quite an achievement to learn how to spell "monocotyledonous" at the age of 8. Miss Armstrong must have been a pretty good teacher.

In hygiene we learnt about the importance of not building "kleinhuisie" toilets on riverbanks upstream of human settlements, because doing that could cause epidemics of various unpleasant diseases. 

Miss Armstrong also introduced us to "Little Golden Books", and my favourites were one about a tugboat and and one about Tootle, the little railway engine that wouldn't stay on the tracks. 

There was another book that had a serious political message. It was about a country with square, round and triangular people, who all lived happily together until the squares seized political power, and decided that everyone had to be square, so they built a machine to force the round and triangular people to become square. Eventually the oppressed round and triangular people revolted, took control of the machine and put it into reverse to restore their own shapes again. 

Thinking about it in retrospect, I think it was a bit of Cold War and post-War propaganda, to warn kids of the dangers of totalitarian systems like Communism and Fascism. 

Of my classmates in Standard 1 I can remember the names of only two, Hilary and Valerie, who shared a desk to my right at the back of the classroom. One day Valerie was missing, and we were told she had been killed in a car crash on the road to Vereeniging over the weekend. We never went to her funeral, and she was just gone.

At one point we were all bussed to Orange Grove Primary School, which was putting on a series of plays. I remember only one, The Monkey's Paw, which was my introduction to horror literature.

I'm sure there will be other things that come to mind, and I'll wonder how I learnt them, and then recall learning them in Miss Armstrong's class at Fairmount School.

Rebellious Victorian schoolboys: Stalky & Co

Stalky and Co. by Rudyard Kipling
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have mixed feelings about this book, and perhaps for that reason I took so long to read it.

It's a school story about three teenage schoolboys at a boarding school in North Devon in England, where Rudyard Kipling himself went to school. These three, Beetle, Turkey (M'Turk) and the eponymous Stalky himself are rebels in the school, rebelling against the teachers, the prefects, and the system of authority. Since the school is in the same area, and shares many of the characteristics of the school that Kipling himself attended, it probably reflects Kipling's own response to his schooling, and his thoughts on education, authority and discipline.

Many of the pupils at the school are children of British army officers, and, since it is set in the late 19th century, it was at the height of British imperialism, so most of the boys were born outside the UK, and many of them plan to have careers in the army.

The school also appears to be run on the lines of a neo-liberal dream, except that it was probably the economic proto-liberalism that neo-liberalism is nostalgically trying to bring back, and which was satirised by its contemporaries, Gilbert and Sullivan in their comic opera Utopia Limited. So the school pays a dividend of 4% to its sharefolders. 

I myself went to a school like that, though it wasn't a high school, it was Mountain Lodge Preparatory School in Magaliesberg, which was private not just in the sense of not being run by the government, but privately run for profit. It came to an end in 1952 when the "Bursar" Mr Burnford absconded with the funds.

One thing I liked about the book is that though many schools of that kind are run on authoritarian lines, and are calculated to foster an authoritarian outlook in their pupils, the three heroes of the story cock a snook at authority and put down authoritarian teachers and prefects. What I didn't much like about it was the sadistic and vengeful manner in which they often did so, and most especially Kipling's evident approval of this.

At Mountain Lodge we had some similar rebellions against authority, though, since we were all pre-teens, they were not as sophisticated and planned as those in Stalky & Co. On one occasion the whole school went on strike over an authoritarian teacher. And, rather as in the book, the whole school was caned, but the following term that teacher did not return.

Kipling makes the point, which I think is a good one, that much of the learning in school actually takes place in extra-curricular activities and is quite unplanned. This would go right against the idea of the Outcomes-Based Education that was recently tried in South African schools with not much success. The outcomes in Stalky and Co are without exception unplanned and unexpected, at least by the school authorities. That too, as been part of my own experience, though mo0re at the level of tertiary education than secondary. Most of the real learning takes place outside the classroom.

The last chapter shows some of the main characters, with the exception of Stalky himself, meeting again after having been out of school for some years, having all seen military service in India, and they share some of their experiences and rumours of Stalky, who has been disciplined by the army as he had been at school. It appears that he had been a military success, but in an unconventional way. Kipling's idea of a good army officer is an irregular and unconventional one. Perhaps Kipling's ideal military leader would be a guerrilla leader, like Che Guevara, or a mercenary leader, like Mad Mike Hoare.

Nearly sixty years later, in 1968, someone made a film with a similar theme. The film was called If, and it is now nearly sixty years since it was made, so Stalky & Co is about life in a school more than 120 years ago, and much of the contemporary schoolboy slang is difficult to follow, but education and its problems seem to continue, regardless of period. The most recent school stories I have read are the Harry Potter books, and even they are now 20-25 years old -- do the current crop of school children still read them, or perhaps they have them set as compulsory boring texts. But some things persist, regardless of period, like Zemblanity in eduction.   

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Literary Theory: an Obituary

Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Terry Eagleton calls his book an "introduction" to literary theory, but rather hopes that he is writing its obituary. He traces the recent history of literary criticism which was initially devoted to getting "English" accepted as a suitable subject to be studied at university, and the focus was generally on the question "what is literature?"

He examines various schools of literary theory, which were mostly linked to contemporary philosophical trends, such as phenomenology, structuralism, poststructuralism and the psychoanalytic school, and points out the inadequacies of all of them. He notes that all are dominated by the question "what is literature", and notes that it becomes a kind of academic racket and power game of indoctrinating students by teaching them to use a certain kind of discourse:

Its apparent generosity at the level of the signified is matched only by its sectarian intolerance at the level of the signifier. Regional dialects of the discourse, so to speak, are acknowledged and sometimes tolerated, but you must not sound as though you are speaking another language altogether. To do so is to recognize in the sharpest way that critical discourse is power. To be on the inside of the discourse itself is to be blind to this power, for what is more natural and non-dominative than to speak one's own tongue?

The power of critical discourse moves on several levels. It is the power of "policing" language -- of determining that certain statements must be excluded because they do not conform to what is acceptably sayable. It is the power of policing writing itself, classifying it into "literary" and "non-literary", the enduringly great and the ephemerally popular. It is the power of authority vis-a-vis others -- the power relations between those who define and preserve the discourse, and those who are selectively admitted to it. It is the power of certificating or non-certificating those who who have been judged to speak the discourse better or worse. Finally, it is a question of the power relations between the literary academic institution, where all of this occurs, and the ruling power-interests of society at large, whose ideological needs will be served and whose personnel will be reproduced by the preservation and controlled extension of the discourse in question (Eagleton 1983:203)

In my experience this academic power game is not confined to English Departments of universities, it is found in several other departments too, often driven by the same philosophical schools.

I studied English literature at two universities. The one, Wits (University of the Witwatersrand) did not seem to adhere to any particular school (but in my naivety as a first-year student I may not have been able to recognise it), and covered a fairly broad spread of literature. The second, the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg (now UKZN) was firmly wedded to the Leavisite school, and had a very narrow conception of what constituted "literature" so I was fairly sympathetic to Eagleton's approach. Academic fads change with time, though, and no doubt the English Department at UKZN has a different emphasis today. At the time, however, it put me off  majoring in English. 

My real education in English literature came from another source altogether -- an Anglican monk, Brother Roger, CR, who lent me all sorts of books to read from the community library, none of which appeared in the university English syllabuses -- Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, Iris Murdoch and Charles Williams, to name a few. 

Eagleton concludes with a suggestion that is both radical and reactionary -- that English Departments at universities should be abolished, in the sense of studying English "literature", and should be replaced by a wider study of communication, which was covered by the older academic study of Rhetoric. This should be applied not merely to texts like Milton's "Paradise Lost", but also to newspaper articles, advertising and the like -- all forms of communication, whether written or spoken.

I'm not sure, though, whether university departments of Communication don't already do that. 


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Twenty years of Model C

It is now twenty years since"Model C" was forced on formerly "white" schools in South Africa, and we still haven't heard the end of it.

Two years later apartheid officially ended, democratic elections were held, and one would have thought that Model C schools, a last-ditch attempt to retain a vestige of apartheid in the former white schools, would have been swept into the dustbin of history, never to be heard of again.

But instead we hear of them quite frequently, and people speak of "Model Cs" and Model C accents", so that instead of being seen as the last twitches of a dying monster, Model C continues, undead, like a vampire, to plague the new South Africa -- as its inventors intended, though perhaps not quite in the way that they intended.

For those who weren't around when Model C schools were introduced, perhaps a brief recap of history may be in order.

The Union of South Africa was formed, in 1910, from two British colonies and two former Boer republics, which became provinces of the Union, and education was regarded as a provincial matter. So the provinces had differing education policies, but within any province all schools followed the same syllabus, and wrote public exams (such as Junior or Senior Certificate) to the same standard. There was disparity between black and white schools, with more money spent on white schools, and white teachers being paid more, but they had the same syllabus and wrote the same exams.

Some provinces insisted on single-medium education for white pupils (either English or Afrikaans) while some allowed dual or parallel medium schools. Provinces could decide whether or not to subsidise church schools and by how much. Most church schools were subsidised.

When the National Party came to power in 1948 it took control of black schools away from the provincial governments and centralised them under the Department of Bantu Education, with a different syllabus tailored to National Party ideology. The government then established "homelands", and when these "homelands" became "independent", control of education was given to them, but only for black pupils. White pupils living in the "homelands" (or white enclaves within the "homelands") had white schools still controlled by the provinces that the homelands had formerly belonged to.

The central government later took control of Coloured and Indian education, and, with the 1983 introduction of a tricameral parliament, took white education away from the provinces as well, placing it under the House of Assembly, the white section of parliament (the others were the House of Representatives, for Coloureds, and the House of Delegates for Indians, but even together they could not outnumber the House of Assembly, so whites remained firmly in control).

So white education became a white "own affair" under the House of Assembly, and all was well in the apartheid heaven that the Nats had created, except that the few remaining church schools (that had not been nationalised at the time of Bantu Education) were no longer anybody's "own affair" and began to admit children of all races.

And then in 1990 the De Klerk government released jailed opposition leaders and unbanned opposition parties. The writing was on the wall. Democracy was coming, and soon all these white "own affairs" schools would come under the control of a non-racial parliament. How to preserve the little bit of "own affairs" apartheid heaven from what was still seen by many in the NP government as the "total onslaught"?

So they came up with a crafty plan. Democracy was beginning to become politically correct, so let's give the parents a say in the schools. So they decided to hold referendums of parents at each school, and presented them with four Models -- A, B, C, and D. If a majority of 90% of the parents in a school decided in an 80% poll to adopt one of the models, then they could have it.

Model A was basically the status quo. An all white school run (and largely paid for) by the House of Assembly own affairs. Model B was similar, except that the school could decide its own admission policy. That meant that if the governing body of the school decided to admit pupils of all races, it could do so.

Model C was essentially privatisation. The school would become a private school, controlling its own admission policy, and would become responsible for upkeep of all the buildings and property as well. There would be a subsidy for teachers, but not to cover all maintenance. Model D was basically one for special needs schools.

In some posh white suburbs the richer parents were attracted to Model C, which seemed to them to be a way of getting a private school on the cheap. Among the less rich, it looked as though in Model C the government was saying, in effect, "if you want black kids in your school, you must pay for it".

The school our children went to, Clapham High School, voted overwhelmingly for Model B. Twice. Over 90% of the parents voted for it. The first time, in February 1991, it just fell short of the necessary 80% poll. So they voted again in September 1991, and made an effort to get all the parents to vote, and well over 90% again voted for Model B.

And a month or two later the school was informed by the government that it would become Model C, which the parents had rejected by an overwhelming majority of votes -- twice.

It was a case of "You will be privatised, whether you want to or not".

Perhaps that was a punishment for wanting to admit pupils of all races, and rejecting the apartheid dream.

And two years later the apartheid dream (which was a nightmare for most people) ended anyway.

Quite a number of parents from different schools held meetings to discuss ways in which Model C could be resisted, but in the end nothing came of them.

But Clapham High School became a Model B school in 1992, and on the 8th of January of that year the first black pupils came to the school. In 1993 it was forced to become Model C, like all the other "House of Assembly" schools. Some relations of ours were thinking of emigrating to New Zealand, and told us that it was because they had had to take out an extra mortgage on their house to pay the Model C fees.

One of the more cringeworthy moments was at a school annual general meeting, where the principal referred to "the successful integration of the formerly Model B and now Model C pupils". To refer to non-white pupils as "Model C pupils" seemed patronising in the extreme. We hoped that after the democratic elections of 1994 we would hear no more of that sort of thing.

Model C schools were introduced about 18 months before the end of apartheid, in a desperate attempt to keep apartheid alive. The song has ended, yet the malady lingers on, and on, and on, and on...

Steyn Krige, RIP

One of my old school teachers died this week.

I suppose I've reached an age where I should not be surprised at such things, but I'm nevertheless saddened by his passing.

He was Marthinus Theunis Steyn Krige, known as Steyn, and he was my geography and scripture teacher at St Stithians College, Randburg, from 1954-1958.

I learnt of his death from an e-mail sent out by the St Stithians Alumni Association

It is with deep regret and sadness that we must inform you that Mr Steyn Krige passed away peacefully on Tuesday night, 27 September 2011, after a long illness.

Steyn was the second Headmaster of the College from 1962 - 68 and the recently-opened class room block at the Boys' College was named the Krige Block in his honour.

Steyn matriculated from Rondebosch Boys' High with a first class Matric and taught at that school before moving to St Stithians. At Saints he became Second Master under Wally Mears as well as Mountstephens Housemaster. He succeeded Mr Mears as Headmaster. He was a conscientious and dedicated teacher and a deeply committed Christian. He was instrumental in founding and developing the Randburg Methodist Church.

Whilst Headmaster of St Stithians, he was also Chairman of the HMC, forerunner of the present day SAHISA (South African Heads of Independent Schools Association) and, as Chairman of the HMC, he played a major role in the opening of private schools to all races.

Steyn was a profound educational thinker and many of his innovations are still with us - the option of African languages, Integrated Studies, a three term year and the tutor system.

He was also a progressive educationalist and, after leaving St Stithians, went on to found Woodmead School which was a beacon of liberal education in the 1970s and '80s. He also founded the New Era Schools Trust, an educational trust, in 1981 together with Dean Yates, a former headmaster of St John's.

Our sincerest sympathies and condolences go to Steyn's widow, Hazel, their children and grandchildren, including Ken, a former teacher at the Boys' College and currently Headmaster of Felixton College in KZN. Please hold them in your thoughts and prayers at this sad time.

His funeral will take place on Friday 30 September 2011 at 14h30 at the Randburg Methodist Church.

Yours sincerely

Stephen Lowry
Rector

David Knowles
Headmaster: Boys' College

Four years ago a fellow blogger challenged people to write about five people, living or dead, who had influenced our spiritual path in a positive way, and I took up the challenge, and this is what I wrote about Steyn Krige Notes from underground: Five influences

He taught me for most of my time in high school at St Stithians College from the age of 12 to the age of 17. For the first couple of years he taught Geography, Chemistry and Scripture. Chemistry wasn't his field, and some of his experiments went horribly wrong, and I think he cookbooked his lessons. But he was a good teacher, and even when his experiments went wrong and the expected didn't happen, we knew what was supposed to have happened.

The year before he came to the school I had begun to break away from my atheist/agnostic upbringing and become interested in reading the Bible, and Steyn Krige hosted voluntary Bible study groups in the housemaster's flat where he lived with his family. He also arranged camps during the school holidays -- in the Western Cape, in the mountains of Lesotho and in other places. And he it was who guided me and showed what it meant to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

I rather hope that someone will write a biography of Steyn Krige one day, because the announcement of his death sent out by the school was almost as notable for what it didn't say as for what it did say.

It said that a classroom block at the school was named after him. I'm glad to hear that, because to my recollection the school treated him pretty shabbily, and it's good to know that they perhaps tried to make amends in that way.

The obituary says that after leaving St Stithians he went on to found Woodmead School, but did not mention the fact that the reason for his leaving St Stithian's was that he was sacked. The story of his sacking was all over the Sunday newspapers back in 1969, but the reasons for it were never revealed. Perhaps now is the time to tell it.

When I heard of Steyn's death I did a Google search for him, and discovered that something similar had happened at Woodmead School, in a fragmentary anonymous article rescued from from Yahoo's Geocities disaster. What happened to Woodmead Schoolo?:

In December 1998, Woodmead School, the first fully multi-racial school in South Africa, closed its doors after twenty-eight years. Employees who had served the school faithfully were evicted from their houses on the property. Some had been there from the beginning. Most had nowhere to go. To exacerbate matters the school's Board breached numerous tenets of the National Labor Laws. It withheld information. It 'fobbed off' concerned parents. In the end, several members of the Board fraudulently 'donated' Woodmead's Preparatory School to a spurious company. It was then secretly sold to Crawford College for a fraction of its value. The people who closed Woodmead School didn't understand its unique place in South African history. What occurred was a tragedy. Why did it happen?

An anonymous article rescued from Yahoo's dustbin is not much to go on, but it does make the questions What happened? Why did it happen? more insistent. It seems that in his teaching career Steyn Krige experienced a considerable amount of back-stabbing.

The Woodmead article goes on to say

When I arrived at Woodmead in 1981, Steyn Krige was still the Headmaster. He had pioneered much of what was unique about Woodmead – the Tutor System, the Tier System, its democratically elected Student Council and Integrated Studies. He particularly liked to discuss Integrated Studies, one of the school's shining lights, and he would periodically announce that it was time for a conference to assess the current progress of the subject. In theory, Integrated Studies replaced English, Geography, History and Social Studies, but in practice it encompassed a great deal more. Emphasis was placed on themes rather than topics. Each theme was approached from different directions and students were encouraged to explore the theme along a range of pathways. Skills were emphasized and independent learning encouraged and fostered. The students were enormously enthusiastic and supportive. There were classes of fifty but the strength and breadth of the subject offset the disadvantage of large classes. What emerged from the Integrated Studies program were highly motivated students who approached their final years of secondary school with confidence and enthusiasm. In 1982, I conducted a series of interviews with Standard 8 (Grade 10) Integrated Studies students who, without exception, spoke in glowing terms about the value of the subject, its significance in the school curriculum and the positive way it had influenced their academic progress.

When I was at St Stithians Steyn Krige was only deputy headmaster and there was no talk of "Integrated Studies", but I think I experienced some of the precursors. On one occasion we had a double period of Scripture and Geography, taught by Steyn, and the one flowed seamlessly into the other with no break, with wide-ranging discussion on all kinds of topics, including the end of the world and flying saucers. We rather smugly thought that we had put one over Steyn, and got away with turning a formal lesson into a bull session. But actually people paid far more attention in the bull session than they did in formal lessons. Perhaps that's where Steyn got the idea, or perhaps he already had the idea, and took advantage of a double period to try it out.

Reading the paragraphs above about Woodmead, it is also clear that by South African standards of the 1970s, Steyn Krige was a loony leftist. By American standards of the present day, he would be regarded as belonging to the Religious Right.

Steyn Krige's theology was Conservative Evangelical.

St Stithians was a Methodist Church school, and a Methodist minister would come and preach in the school chapel on Sunday mornings, but the rest of the week the religious life of the school was guided and directed by Steyn Krige (a Methodist) and Derek Hudson-Reed (a Baptist) and they ran the informal evangelistic "hot gospel" sessions on Sunday evenings, which usually ended in an "altar call", and the voluntary Bible study and prayer meetings where we learned far more than in formal "Scripture" classes. Steyn was a Pre-Trib Pre-Millenniallist, though he never used those terms and I only came to understand what they meant several decades later. He taught the "rapture", though he never used such fancy theological terms, and it was only much later that I discovered the theological meaning of that as well.

So when I was at school, Steyn Krige was showing that it was possible to be politically liberal (and even radical) while being theologically conservative, and I'm sure that those aspects of his life were pretty well integrated too.

And I suspect that this may have been one reason why he was sacked. School boards, and even the boards of church schools, tend to be composed of hard-headed businessmen (who, it would be hoped, would be good at raising money for the school), but to such businessmen both religious fanaticism and political radicalism would be anathema. But I'm guessing now -- that's why it would be good to know the real story.

I try to think of what my life might have been like if Steyn Krige had not influenced me as he did, and somehow I just can't imagine it.

South Africa Needs Thousands More and Better Teachers Every Year | NGO Pulse

South Africa Needs Thousands More and Better Teachers Every Year | NGO Pulse

An examination of teacher supply and demand leads to the conclusion that South Africa urgently needs more and better teachers and that the country’s teacher management and training system needs radical overhaul.

According to Ann Bernstein, CDE executive director: “Many existing teachers are poorly managed and are not teaching effectively. This is partly because many of them have been badly trained. In addition, SA’s teachers are often poorly utilised. For example, there is a shortage of maths teachers, yet many qualified maths teachers are not teaching maths – despite being willing to do so.”

These are among the key findings of a new report by the Centre for Development and Enterprise (CDE), Value in the Classroom: The quantity and quality of South Africa’s teachers.

“South Africa’s education system is underperforming, especially in terms of maths and science results. When compared to many other developing countries, our expenditure on education is not being matched by results, and research shows decisively that good teaching is vital for better results,” said Bernstein.

Now they tell us!

That should have been one of the highest priorities of the first democratically elected government in 1994 -- the transformation of education.

Children who were born in 1994 will be leaving school at the end of this year, and the education of an entire generation of entire generation of school children has been compromised.

We knew that the education system was underperforming back then, and nothing was done, other than introduce OBE (Outcomes-based education) which makes hugely increased demands on teachers, who were for the most part undertrained and badly trained. Instead of introducing a new system, priority should have been given to training and re-training teachers, but "transformation" was merely a buzz-word in the mouths of politicians, and made little difference to the education system.

Certainly it needs overhauling, but we knew that back in 1994. Why have we wasted 17 years? And what hope is there that we won't waste the next 17 years too?

Learning styles

I've come across a couple of interesting (to me, at any rate) quizzes on learning styles - hat-tip to my blogging friend Richard Fairhead at God-Word-Think: Learning styles:

Why is a Sunday church meeting so screwy to me? I have been looking at learning styles and done a couple of inventories:

Unlike Richard, I don't relate them to Sunday church meetings, because I don't regard those meetings as primarly educational. I don't go to church to learn things, or to be entertained, but to worship. But there are educational gatherings and events, and so it is quite interesting to know this stuff.

• www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html
• www.learning-styles-online.com/inventory/

For the first, mine says:

Results for: Steve Hayes ACT X REF 11 9 7 5 3 1 1 3 5 7 9 11 <-- --> SEN X INT 11 9 7 5 3 1 1 3 5 7 9 11 <-- --> VIS X VRB 11 9 7 5 3 1 1 3 5 7 9 11 <-- --> SEQ X GLO 11 9 7 5 3 1 1 3 5 7 9 11 <-- -->

If your score on a scale is 1-3, you are fairly well balanced on the two dimensions of that scale. If your score on a scale is 5-7, you have a moderate preference for one dimension of the scale and will learn more easily in a teaching environment which favors that dimension. If your score on a scale is 9-11, you have a very strong preference for one dimension of the scale. You may have real difficulty learning in an environment which does not support that preference. The scales are: ACTIVE AND REFLECTIVE LEARNERS Active learners tend to retain and understand information best by doing something active with it--discussing or applying it or explaining it to others. Reflective learners prefer to think about it quietly first. "Let's try it out and see how it works" is an active learner's phrase; "Let's think it through first" is the reflective learner's response. Active learners tend to like group work more than reflective learners, who prefer working alone. Sitting through lectures without getting to do anything physical but take notes is hard for both learning types, but particularly hard for active learners. SENSING AND INTUITIVE LEARNERS Sensing learners tend to like learning facts, intuitive learners often prefer discovering possibilities and relationships. Sensors often like solving problems by well-established methods and dislike complications and surprises; intuitors like innovation and dislike repetition. Sensors are more likely than intuitors to resent being tested on material that has not been explicitly covered in class. Sensors tend to be patient with details and good at memorizing facts and doing hands-on (laboratory) work; intuitors may be better at grasping new concepts and are often more comfortable than sensors with abstractions and mathematical formulations. Sensors tend to be more practical and careful than intuitors; intuitors tend to work faster and to be more innovative than sensors. Sensors don't like courses that have no apparent connection to the real world; intuitors don't like "plug-and-chug" courses that involve a lot of memorization and routine calculations. VISUAL AND VERBAL LEARNERS Visual learners remember best what they see--pictures, diagrams, flow charts, time lines, films, and demonstrations. Verbal learners get more out of words--written and spoken explanations. Everyone learns more when information is presented both visually and verbally. SEQUENTIAL AND GLOBAL LEARNERS Sequential learners tend to gain understanding in linear steps, with each step following logically from the previous one. Global learners tend to learn in large jumps, absorbing material almost randomly without seeing connections, and then suddenly "getting it." Sequential learners tend to follow logical stepwise paths in finding solutions; global learners may be able to solve complex problems quickly or put things together in novel ways once they have grasped the big picture, but they may have difficulty explaining how they did it. The ones that seem to be most pronounced in me are the Intuitive and Global styles, which I suppose goes along with being INTP on the Myers-Briggs scale. What gives me most pause for thought about this, though, is that when I've marked student assignments in the past, I probably have had a bias towards the Intuitive/Global students, and tended to give them higher marks than the Sensing and Sequential learners. How much is that my bias, or perhaps a bias that the subject (Missiology) requires? Perhaps I have a sub-conscious feeling that the Sensing and Sequential learners should be learning to make tables or something. And for the other quiz, my result was Memletic Learning Styles Graph:

Zimbabwe is top in literacy rate in all Africa

In spite of the last decade of misrule, it seems that Zimbabwe's literacy rate is still rising. Africa Review - Zimbabwe is top in literacy rate in all Africa:

Zimbabwe has overtaken Tunisia as the country with the highest literacy rate in Africa despite the numerous problems that continue to dog its once enviable education sector

According to the UNDP's latest statistical digest, the southern African country has a 92 per cent literacy rate, up from 85 per cent.

Tunisia remains at 87 per cent.

Post-independence Zimbabwe’s education was heavily subsidised by government, resulting in vast improvements from the colonial system.

Zimbabwean graduates remain marketable the world over.

In 2005 I was involved with some others in planting a new Orthodox Church in Tembisa, in Ekurhuleni. We met in a preprimary school, where most of the teachers were graduates -- refugees from Zimbabwe. And it soon became apparent that the Zimbabweans were way better educated than most South Africans. We looked for leaders, who could read the services, and it was the Zimbabweans who were competent and picked it up quickly.

The Zimbabweans had a head start on South Africans. They never had Bantu Education. They never had Christian National Edcuation, which was neither Christian, not national, nor education.

But there are some lessons in this for South Africa.

What did we do to try to counter Bantu Education?

We introduced Outcomes-Based Education.

In theory, that was not a bad idea. The principle of outcomes-based education is a good one -- you judge how well it is working by what pupils actually learn, and you remove the excuse of bad teachers: "We taught them that, but they didn't learn it".

It aims to replace rote learning with teaching pupils to think.

The problem is, however, that as a complete system it requires teachers who are equipped to run it, and teachers who had been trained in rote-learning under the Bantu Education system simply couldn't cope.

The best way to reverse the effects of Bantu Education would have been to engage in a massive retraining of teachers, a re-education programme, in fact. Instead, experienced teachers (pre-Bantu Education) were enouraged to take early retirement, and the number of teacher training institutions was reduced.

And who would do the teaching while the teachers were being re-trained?

Zimbabwean and other refugees, of course!

There are hundreds of them, probably working in menial jobs, their skills going to waste, and instead we deport them as illegal immigrants. That is what happened to some of the teachers at the pre-primary school in Tembisa.

Another observation I have made is that at our Catechetical School in Yeoville, johannesburg, we have had a number of refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They got their education in French, and yet managed to cope with teaching in English far better than most South Africans. It's another country that has seen turmoil for the last 50 years or more, and yet still seems to manage to produce well-educated people.

OK, it's possible that the refugees are the smart ones, and the illiterate ones stayed at home. Dictatorial governments usually like to crack down on the intelligentsia, so they are often among the first to leave. But whatever the reason, the fact is that we have their skills in South Africa and we are not using them. If we did, we might soon surpass Zimbabwe in literacy.

Two gardens

We're interested in family history and last week we went to the Mormon Family History Centre in Johannesburg to do some research in their library (details of what we found are on our family history blog).

One of the things I always enjoy when visiting there is the walk from the car park to the reading room, through a garden filled with ponts and shady trees. The ponds have goldfish in them, and it is a pleasant peaceful place, and it's cool shade is especially good in summer.

And then on alternate Sundays we go to church in Mamelodi, where we have services in a classroom at the Zakhele Primary Schooll. Outside is a vegetable garden, where the kids learn about botany and agriculture, and last Sunday it seemed in particularly good condition. It seemed to say something about the quality of the teachers and the diligence of the learners, and gives one hope for the future of education. This picture was taken from the window of the classroom where we had just held our service.



So there are two gardens, one ornamental, and the other practical and educational.

Cummer gain?

Yesterday was the European Day of Languages, the 26 of September, and to commemorate it someone on the alt.usage.english newsgroup suggested that people try their hand at translating the following into understandable English:

All literacy across learning experiences and outcomes

People who want to teach literacy first need to be literate themselves, or is it just that Scotch dialect is outwith the remit of English speakers?

Language culture and education

clipped from www.thetimes.co.za Afrikaans-speaking parents are pulling their children out of Newcastle High School, claiming the pupils are being discriminated against. Twenty-seven learners left the former Afrikaans-medium school this week to attend the neighbouring Ferrum High School. Parents claim that black teachers can’t speak Afrikaans. They also maintain that deputy principal Muggie Liebenberg was overlooked for the principal’s position, despite doing “excellent work”. Parent Francois Lichtenstein, who unsuccessfully took the governing body to court to force it to retain the school’s Christian identity, said Afrikaans was deliberately being eroded. But new principal Manuel Govender denied that Afrikaans was being done away with. “It’s very sad that people can’t accept change. I understand change is very difficult, but at the end of the day we can learn to tolerate our differences,” he said.

I can't help thinking that there is more to this story than meets the eye. Even when one reads the full version, rather than the bits I've cited in the clip, it seems that there is more in the subtext than in the text itself, one needs to read between the lines to find the issues that everyone seems to be trying to avoid.

The trouble is that there are several different issues here: does one try to unravel them and deal with them one by one, or must they be seen holistically, as things that cannot be disentangled?

One issue is language.

A group of Afrikaans-speaking parents are unhappy because the language used in teaching has changed, and their children are being taught in English rather than Afrikaans.

My mind goes back 30 years, when I lived in Utrecht, which is about 50 km from Newcastle. An English-speaking family I knew took their daughter out of the local primary school and sent her to a church school in Newcastle. Why? Because the local school was predominantly Afrikaans. Back in those days, of course, all the pupils at government schools were white. In Natal, most government schools in small towns were dual-medium -- they taught in both Afrikaans and English, and each child was theoretically entitled to be taught in its own language.

In Utrecht, however, the majority of the children and all the teachers were Afrikaans speaking. The school principal spoke to the child's mother, and asked why she wanted to take her child out of the school. She was doing quite well, and she could understand the lessons that were given in Afrikaans. The mother replied that those were not her objections. She was quite happy for her daughter to be taught Maths, Geography and the like through the medium of Afrikaans. What she was not happy about, however, was that the child was being taught to speak bad English by the Afrikaans-speaking teachers who could not speak English very well. The teachers at the Utrecht school would mark her English homework wrong when it was right, and punish her for speaking and writing correct English. The mother sent her daughter as a weekly boarder to Newcastle so that she could learn to speak and write her own language properly.

Now the boot is on the other foot. Afrikaans parents are having to have their children taught by English-speaking teachers. I can sympathise with their position. They surely have a right to have their children taught to speak and write their own language properly, even if they learn Maths and Geography through English.

If language were the only problem, then it could be solved by the education department doing a survey, and discovering how many Afrikaans speaking children there are in the town and where they live, and plan schools accordingly. The trouble is that most of the existing schools were planned in the days of apartheid, when people lived in segregated areas, and Afrikaans schools were given preference. The legacy of apartheid lives on. Now the demographics have changed, and perhaps the Afrikaans schools need to be consolidated.

But there is more to it than just language, of course, and that is where the sub-texts come in.

One person quoted in the report spoke of the "Christian identity" of the the school, and another mentioned an "Indian broederbond" that had taken over the school governing body.

So it's not just language, but religion and race as well.

And that is where I wonder about the things that we are not told in the report.

What is meant by the "Christian identity" of the school being eroded? Is it that most of the teachers are now using a heathen language like English, or are they now singing hymns to Shiva at the school assembly?

The platitudes from the principal that end the article don't seem to get near what is really going on.

Moral regeneration, degeneration, confusion

There is much talk of the need for moral regneration. There is much talk of the need for values.

But it also seems that while many people agree that there is a need for values, they can't agree on what those values are, and are determined to force other people to conform to their values rather than find what values they share in common, and agree to work together to promote those, and agree to disagree about the ones they don't share.

There have been some examples in the news lately, and various people have blogged about them as well, including me.

Let's start with the need for values.

Christian values only thing holding Britain together, says Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor:

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, Archbishop of Westminster and head of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, on Monday said that “Judeo-Christian values” were the only thing holding British society together, the Guardian reports...

"People are looking for a common good in this country. A very large number of people are saying, 'What is it that binds British people together?'" Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor said. “There is no other heritage than the Judaeo-Christian heritage in this country." Replacing that heritage with a “totally secular view of life,” the cardinal said, would lead the nation down “a very dangerous path.”

Let's leave aside for the moment the fact that many Jews find the "Judeo-Christian" epithet pretty offensive, regarding it as an attempt by Christians to co-opt them willy-nilly as part of a Christian agenda. Let's look at the British "Judaeo-Christian heritage". I can't remember when it was that Jews got the vote in Britain, but I think it was some time after the Catholics.

So let's leave aside the Jews for the moment, since they were excluded from contributing to the heritage for so long. Let's look at the Christian part of that heritage. The Anglicans in England and Wales had votes before the Jews and Catholics did, but today they are tearing themselves apart because they can't agree on sexual morality. As I noted in a post on my other blog, African Anglicans and homosexuality, the Anglican Communion seems to be having its very own clash of civilizations between Western and African civilizations.

In that post the point was that African Anglicans who lived in close proximity to Muslims, as they do in Nigeria and Uganda, recall the very beginnings of their church, which began with the martyrdom of Christian pages at the court of the King of Buganda, who "had adopted Arab customs of pederasty, and he expected the young men of his court to submit to his demands. But a growing number of Christian courtiers and pages refused to participate, despite his threats, and an enraged king launched a persecution that resulted in hundreds of martyrdoms".

Think for a moment of those "Arab customs of pederasty", and now switch to something I blogged about just a few days ago in this blog: Notes from underground: Muslim parents ask UK schools to shelve pro-homosexual storybooks for 5-year-olds.

It seems that the Anglicans are not the only ones who find it hard to agree on sexual morality.

And who was it who represented Britain's "Judaeo-Christian heritage" -- the school authorities who prescribed the story books, or the Muslim parents who objected to them?

Now the accuracy of the story has been questioned, but assuming that it is true in outline, what is doing on here?

Ostensibly the reason for prescribing such stories is to prevent bullying in schools.

Now I haven't read the stories, and the descriptions in the news media may not be accurate, but the parental objections seem to be not that the stories are aimed at preventing bullying, but that they are teaching their five-year-old children sexual ethics that the parents disagree with, and don't say much about bullying. I wonder if those stories would have dissuaded the King of Buganda from bullying his pages?

It seems rather disingenuous.

Think about it another way. I bet that quite a number of Muslim kids in Britain are bullied by non-Muslim kids who tease them and say that their big brothers are making bombs in the attic. So how should this bullying be dealt with? Write story books for little kids showing that it's cool to make bombs?

One could go on multiplying examples to show that one of the main difficulties in the way of promoting moral regeneration and education in values is that people simply cannot agree which system of values to promote, and this leads to unedifying power struggles, with Anglicans in America suing one another over ownership of church buildings as a result of their failure to agree and determination to impose their set of values on everyone else.

In the mean time, things continue to get worse, as we see in an incident that took place closer to home, right here in Gauteng.

clipped from www.thetimes.co.za While police are still in the dark about the identity of the driver who shot and killed a 12-year-old smash-and-grabber, it appears many South Africans have little sympathy for the young boy. Comments on The Times website seemed to weigh in favour of the unknown gunman who killed the boy in Boksburg on Friday, with some even suggesting the killing of the youngster rid the country of a future criminal. The boy was shot after he apparently smashed the window of a white Citi Golf on Rondebult Road in Boksburg, East of Johannesburg, and stole a cellphone. A witness claimed the boy ran away, but was chased by the driver who shot him in the chest and then fled the scene in his car.

Yes, there does seem to be a need for education in values in our society.

It seems that nobody taught this boy "Thou shalt not steal."

And nobody taught the driver of the car, "Thou shalt not kill."

Or perhaps someone taught them that, but they didn't learn it. As they say in edu-jargon, the learning outcomes were not achieved.

And the reported response of people to the incident shows that that failure is widespread throughout our society.

My to-do list

• 1. Destroy marriage
• 2. Destabilise family life
• 3. Flush civilization down the drain
  

That is what my to-do list must look like, if this blog is to be believed:

Contact Online Weblog: How the decline of marriage is destroying our pupils:

Do we realise that the liberal agenda is destroying our children and probably our civilisation is going down the drain too....faster than we think - in South Africa as well.

And it goes on to quote an article that says

The decline of marriage is leading to widespread underachievement and indiscipline in schools, teachers warned yesterday.

Children with "chaotic" home lives turn up at school too troubled to learn, wrecking their prospects of success in exams, they said.

Growing numbers are being brought up in splintered families by mothers with children by different fathers, leading to behaviour and mental health problems including eating disorders and suicidal thoughts, a teachers’ conference heard.

Since I am a liberal, and those are the items on "the liberal agenda", they must be high on my to-do list too.

Now with all due respect to my blogging friend who wrote that (and he is a friend), terms like "the liberal agenda" used like that do not facilitate communication, but impede it.

The use of the definite article -- "the" liberal agenda -- imply that those items are high on the list of priorities of every single liberal in the world. All liberals everywhere are out to destroy marriage, families and civilization.

Well, I know Mr Vorster believed that, but as Jonty Driver, a South African student leader, said when Mr Vorster called him a "leftist", "It is no shame to be called a leftist by such a prominent rightist".

It was Mr Vorster's National Party government, with its conservative right-wing agenda, that deliberately set out to destroy family life through influx control and the migratory labour system. And it was a prominent South African Liberal, Alan Paton, (who was national president of the Liberal Party, so if anyone's agenda was liberal, it was his) who ran a school for juvenile delinquents and was fully aware of the effects of the destruction of family life in hindering children's learning.

I am heartily sick of the calumniation of liberals and liberalism in this fashion, by such vicious lies and innuendoes.

Brit teachers teachers told to rewrite history of Iraqi-American War

In a week in which it is estimated that the number of civilian casualties in the Iraqi-American War has passed 1 million...

Iraq: teachers told to rewrite history - Education News, Education - Independent.co.uk

Britain's biggest teachers' union has accused the Ministry of Defence of breaking the law over a lesson plan drawn up to teach pupils about the Iraq war. The National Union of Teachers claims it breaches the 1996 Education Act, which aims to ensure all political issues are treated in a balanced way.

Teachers will threaten to boycott military involvement in schools at the union's annual conference next weekend, claiming the lesson plan is a 'propaganda' exercise and makes no mention of any civilian casualties as a result of the war.

... and a week after military personnel at a base near Peterborough were advised not to wear their uniforms when going to town, because of the hostility of the general populace to the war. The media were presenting this as something bad because military personnel should be proud of their uniforms, but everything that has happened over the last few years suggests that they should be ashamed of wearing them, and this report reinforces that impression.

Transformation in education -- or the lack of it

For the last fifteen years or more there has been talk of the need for "transformation" in education. One of the things that was done was to introduce "Outcomes-based Education" (OBE). And what was the outcome?

Mary Metcalfe, former Gauteng MEC for Education, and now head of the Education Department at Wits university writes The Times - Article:

Every year on average for the past four years, of the learners who reached matric, only 17% achieved the standard necessary to proceed to university. A third failed matric

TEN years is a short time in education. It takes four years to train a teacher, seven years to pass through primary education, and many years for changes in curriculum intention to take firm root in classrooms. It may be that the annual matric media circus has focused our attention narrowly on the expectation that for this nation of “miracles” there might be a quick-fix solution after the ravages of apartheid education; that our exceptionalism will mean that because we wish it, “next year” will be better. The hard reality is that we are not making the progress we need in the two most critical dimensions of education performance: quality and equity.

Part of the problem is the resistance of educational institutions to transformation, or for transformation that is too narrowly defined, and inadequately measured.

The biggest tertiary education institution in South Africa is the University of South Africva (Unisa). In the 1990s there were about 30000 school teachers registered there as students at any one time, hoping to improve their qualifications. When I began working in the Editorial Department at Unisa in 1986 I was told horror stories about the Faculty of Education by my colleagues. One was of a translator, translating a study guide from Afrikaans to English. She went to see the lecturer, and said she was unable to translate some of the text because she could not understand it. And the lecturer said, "You don't have to understand it, you just have to translate it."

I thought this was an apocryphal story, an exaggeration for the sake of effect, until I was editing a study guide for Fundamental Pedagogics 101. After labouring through the first chapter I went to the lecturer to try to clarify some problems with the text, and showed her the text as I had edited it. She got very angry: "Who crossed this out?" "I did." "Why?" "I couldn't understand it." "You're not supposed to understand it. This is specialised stuff".

Bear in mind that this was a 101 course, and many students who would be taking it would have come straight from school. If I, having two degrees, could not understand it, how could a school leaver be expected to? The story I had heard was not apocryphal, it was perfectly true, and it goes a long way to explain the malaise in education in South Africa today. It begins with the way that many teachers were trained in the apartheid years, and, because of the failure of transformation, for many years afterwards as well.

Unisa needed to be transformed from a Broederbond institution into one that could do something to improve education for the whole country. People in the Education Faculty kept talking about the need not to "lower standards", but there was no danger of that: their standards were as low as they could possibly get. There was only one way they could go, and that was up. The trouble was that most of the lecturers had themselves been trained in the pseudo-scientific discipline of "Fundamental Pedagogics", and were incapable of transforming anything.

One lecturer finally came to the realisation that "Fundamental Pedagogics" was no longer politically correct, as it had been under the apartheid regime. So what did he do? What was his effort at transformation? When his study guide needed to be revised (Unisa demanded revision of study materials every three years) he simply went through the text with a word processor and used the search and replace function to replace every instance of "fundamental pedagogics" with "philosophy of education". Hey Presto! His study guide was now "transformed" and politically correct in the new South Africa. Never mind that he had not read through the text to see the effect of his changes -- that in many places he had used the word "pedagogical" to refer to the "pedagogics" that had now by word magic become "philosophy", so that it made even less sense than before. But that didn't matter. The students did not have to understand it, they just had to learn it.

Much of the activity of the Education Faculty at Unisa was devoted to devising complicated terminology for ordinary things, to make it sound more "scientific", on the principle of "bullshit baffles brains". "History of Adult Education", for example, was called "Temporal Andragogics", which, quite apart from being bullshit, was also sexist, since it referred only to adult male education.

What Stanislav Andreski said of his own discipline (sociology) applies equally here too:

Sometimes the verbal substitutions masquerading as contributions to knowledge are so inept and gross that it is difficult to believe that the authors really think they are revealing new truths (which must be the case), and that they are not laughing up their sleeves at the gullibility of their audience. One of the crassest examples of such delusions is the recent vogue for the letter 'n', chosen to deputize for the common word 'need' because of its status-bestowing properties stemming from its frequent appearance in mathematical formulae. So by scribbling the letter 'n' all over their pages some people have succeeded in surrounding their platitudes with the aura of the exact sciences in their own eyes, as well as those of their readers who might have seen some books on mathematics without being able to understand them (Andreski Social sciences as sorcery 1972:63).

The attraction of jargon and obfuscating convolutions can be fully explained by the normal striving of humans for emoluments and prestige at the least cost to themselves, the cost in question consisting of the mental effort and danger of
'sticking one's neck out' or 'putting one's foot in it'. In addition to eliminating such risks, as well as the need to learn much, nebulous verbosity opens a road to the most prestigious academic posts to people of small intelligence whose limitations would stand naked if they had to state what they have to say clearly and succinctly (Andreski Social sciences as sorcery 1972:82).

Eventually the head of the Editorial Department could take it no more, and he said that the Editorial Department would refuse to accept any more study material from the Faculty of Education for editing and translation unless the quality improved, as it was defrauding students, getting them to pay fees for worthless study material. He was warned that disciplinary action would be taken against him. I went with him to see Mary Metcalfe, who was then Gauteng MEC for Education. There wasn't much she could do, but at least she could be aware of the extent of the problem. Ten years later, she's still in it up to her neck, and I wish her luck with it. She needs it, South Africa needs it.

The Broederbond rallied round, and the head of the Editorial Department at Unisa was fired. This was in 1996, in the "new" South Africa. He was fired for wanting genuine transformation, and not a farce. He was fired for wanting to raise standards in education, not merely in Unisa, but in the country.

Don't get me wrong. Unisa has produced a lot of good courses. In the Editorial Department we were the last line of defence in the way of quality control, and we saw both the good and the bad. Some was good, some was very good. But the output of the Faculty of Education was very, very bad.

Before ending this rant, perhaps one more story. A few months after the sacking of the head of department an education study guide came up for review. It had been available for three years, so needed to be revised. It was exceptional; it was clear, well-written and useful. I spoke to my colleague who had worked on it the first time round. She said the lecturer had been cooperative, and they had worked hard on it together. I spent a couple of weeks trying to improve it further, and found it a pleasure to work with a text that actually had something to say rather than the usual meaningless platitudes wrapped up in obfuscating language.

A couple of weeks later we got a complaint from the university administration. Why had we wasted so much time and resources revising that course, when all the stock of original study guides were sitting in the despatch department untouched, because not a single student had registered for the course!

Oh the irony of it! The Education Faculty produced one decent course among dozens of bad ones, and no students registered for it.

Zemblanity and education

A few years ago I was a member of an SGB of SAQA, that is a Standards Generating Body for the South African Qualifications Authority. It was the standards generating body for Christian Theology and Ministry, and had to generate standards, that is learning outcomes, for various theological qualifications from Grade 10 to Doctorate in Theology.

The SGB completed its work a couple of years ago, and a bunch of standards were registered. But now, it appears, they have to be revised, and so the SGB is being reconstituted, and will have to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops again.

I don't mind too much. I quite enjoyed the meetings, because I met a group of stimulating and creative people from a variety of Christian traditions. I was able to meet some old friends and make some new ones. But the work we were required to do was frustrating. One could see that it had some good intentions and good goals -- to raise the general standard of education, to weed out incompetent and fraudulent educational institutions and so on. But at the same time it seemed likely to stifle initiative, frustrate learning, and make education prohibitively expensive.

I was thus interested to read this, which seems to sum up the drawbacks and dangers of the current system: Changing the World (and other excuses for not getting a proper job...): Serendipitous Learning and Zemblanitous Education

The core of it deserves to be quoted:

...serendipity has an opposite. An antonym, in fact. (And how often do you get to use that word?) 'Zemblanity' is a more recent coinage, the work of the novelist William Boyd:

So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds, seawashed, sunbasted? Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone. Call it Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.

All this I learned by following up a presentation by a Finnish guy called Teemu Arina - which I came across thanks to a post from Artichoke. Teemu reckons (and I agree) that "making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design" is a pretty good description of what happens in formal education, when "learning outcomes" are specified in advance.

And I've been rereading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, where the bureaucratic mentality of educationists (or pedagogicians, as some of them like to call themselves) is satirised in the person of Dolores Umbridge.

Outcomes-based education was introduced into South Africa after our first democratic elections in 1994. It was an attempt to remedy the damage caused to the South African education system by four decades of the National Party policy of "Christian National Education" (which, as Christian educators often pointed out, was neither Christian, nor national, nor education). The damage was worst in Bantu Education, which was hived off into a separate government department that made the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter look positively sane. The whole evil system was underpinned by the pseudoscience of "Fundamental Pedagogics", which was used to cripple thousands of student teachers at the start of their careers, and consisted mainly in the rote learning of obscurantist definitions of terms that were dressed up in pompous and bombastic language -- a smoke and mirrors trick to make them appear more "scientific". For example, one had to learn such terms as "Temporal Andragogics" (the History of Adult Education, I kid you not).

One of the "learning outcomes" of this system was that students learnt that you did not have to understand this outlandish terminology, you just had to learn the definition by rote and repeat it in the exams. The most important learning outcome was slavish political correctness. You said what your teachers, lecturers and bosses wanted to hear.

At the University of South Africa (which trained more teachers than any other institution in the country) a Fundamental Pedagogician said (of an incomprehensible passage in a first-year study guide), "they don't have to understand it, they just have to learn it." Or, as another one said to a person who was trying to translate a study guide from Afrikaans to English, and could not understand the Afrikaans text, "you don't have to understand it, you just have to translate it." This was said without tongue in cheek, dead seriously. Dolores Umbridge had a great deal to learn from the Department of Fundamental Pedagogics at Unisa; she was a mere amateur by comparison.

After all that, I can sympathise with "outcomes-based education" (OBE), at least in theory. It moved the emphasis from curriculum (input) to what is actually learned. It takes away the excuse of teachers who say "we taught them that but they didn't learn it."

But as it has been applied in South Africa, I doubt that it can remedy the disease of "Christian National Education". Many teachers who were trained in Fundamental Pedagogics will, and have, treat it simply as a slightly different variety of political correctness -- new terms to be learned by rote and used, especially when within earshot of your boss.

So Outcomes-Based Education comes with its own vocabulary. The emphasis is not on what teachers teach, but rather on what learners learn, so it is important to think of learners as people who are learning, regardless of age, and so when speaking of the actual education process one speaks of "learners" rather than "students" or "pupils". Students study, and pupils are supervised by tutors, but learners learn. But when a teacher is quoted in a newspaper as saying that "One of the pu... learners was run over by a car outside the school yesterday," you know that political correctness is rearing its ugly head again. It doesn't matter what the word "learner" means, it is the one my boss's boss wants us to say. Rote learning of educational jargon does not make a good teacher.

Again, real life trumps satire like Harry Potter every time. At the University of South Africa a few years ago a task group was set up by the university administration, and the task group announced that its task was to "facilitate conflict".

The theory behind the South African Qualifications Authority is good in some ways. If you had standard learning outcomes at various levels, then it is easier to say that one qualification is equivalent to another. A person transferring to a different university or a different faculty can be given credit for previous learning because they have achieved known outcomes to a known standard. Scammers who rip people off by offering bogus qualifications at fly-by-night institutions with high fees and low standards can be closed down.

But sometimes education, especially in a specialised field like theological education, can be, and sometimes is, done on a shoe string. I visited the St Sergius Institute in Paris in 1968. The students lived in poverty, in a basement under the church, with an open drain running down the middle of the floor, and cloth partitions between the beds. Most of them were Russian exiles, but some came from other countries. Their teachers were part time, their library facilities were minimal. They would never pass inspection by the educational bureaucracy. Yet they were motivated to learn, and learnt what they needed to learn. Registering such an institution in the new South Africa would be virtually impossible, and the fee for a single inspection would be more than the institution's budget for three years. Far better that they should use the money for improving their teaching and facilities than on bureaucracy.

In South Africa today there are hundreds of refugee teachers from Zimbabwe who are better qualified than many South African teachers, and whatever the problems of Zimbabwe in the past or present, were not crippled by "Christian National Education". Some of them teach in unregistered private schools, which would be closed down if the education authorities knew what was going on. But they are probably doing as much to remedy the deficiencies of South African education as many of the bureaucrats.

And back in the "old" South Africa a friend of mine, John Aitchison, organised a night school for the staff of the then University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg -- cooks, cleaners, gardeners and so on, who had had little chance of education as children. Another volunteer effort, run on a shoestring, the teachers all being students and a few lecturers. By such means some people were able to bypass Bantu Education and have education for liberation. But it would be difficult to run such things under present regulations.

To return to Zemblanity. Another friend of mine, Larry Gilley, once returned from a meeting of people trying to develop an interdenominational Sunday School curriculum at which they had debated the relative merits of a Bible-centred curriculum or a child-centred curriculum. He remarked that it didn't matter much, because whichever one they opted for, they would still end up with a curriculum-centred curriculum.

You may change the government, you may change the system, but zemblanity in education will cling like a limpet.

The Illegal Alien Is My Neighbour!

izzonline: South African economy built on cheap black labour. Izzonline makes an important point. There's a lot of xenophobia about. It's not only in South Africa. A few years ago I was touring Greece with my wife and daughter, and we stayed at a hotel that was not really open, because the tourist season had not yet started. It was in a little fishing village. The owner brought his motorbike in to the vestibule for the night, "otherwise the Albanians will steal it".

And I somehow felt right at home, because back home in South Africa we would blame the Zimbabweans. It is estimated that there are something like a million illegal immigrants from Albania in Greece, and perhaps three times that number of Zimbabweans in South Africa.

But I've not really met and talked to the Zimbabweans (or Mozambicans or whoever) who have stolen my stuff. But I have met and talked to honest Zimbabweans in South Africa, and what strikes me about them is that they are a lot better-educated than most South Africans. I teach in our church theological school, and it is the foreigners who are better students -- Zimbabweans, Congolese. In the case of the Congolese, English is not a second but a third language, yet they pick it up and use it better than South Africans. In church services we read the Psalms a lot, and I found a Zimbabwean who could read the psalms fluently in English (which was his second language), while a South African whose home language was Northern Sotho stumbled over them in that language.

OK, Zimbabwe and Congo never had Bantu Education. But they have had economic meltdowns and civil wars, so they haven't exactly had a good learning environment either. And the fact is that while some illegal immigrants may be criminals, others are hard-working honest people among them who are better-educated than many South Africans and are assets to the South African economy.

And the criminals are probably better-educated than our police, which is why the police are running around in circles, and hardly ever catch them.

Quite a long time ago now I visited Singapore, and I was interested in their philosophy. They were a small country, and their only asset was their people. So they reasoned that they must develop that asset and spend a lot of money on education. And we in South Africa must do the same. So what if the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund demand that we apply "structural adjustment" programmes designed to keep our people in ignorance? To hell with them; let their structural adjustment programmes go back to hell where they came from.

And perhaps we need to be using those illegal immigrant teachers from Congo and Zimbabwe and such places to teach South Africans a love of learning and the meaning of hard work.

And then there is Sepherim: The Illegal Alien Is My Neighbor!, who shows how unChristian the attitude of some so-called Christians is towards illegal immigrants.