The state of education in SA
CANDICE BRADFIELD
MEMBERS of the Lower Albany Historical Society were helped to understand the present state of education in South Africa from a historical perspective, at the annul Morse Jones Memorial lecture last week.
Professor Arthur Webb from the Centre for Higher Education, Teaching and Learning at Rhodes University was the guest speaker at the LAHS meeting at Settlers Park.
| DOES OBE WORK?: Professor Arthur Webb addressed the Lower Albany Historical Society on education in South Africa and the advantages and disadvantages of Outcome Based Education (OBE) Picture: CANDICE BRADFIELD |
In his metaphor, the cart is theory and the horse represents teachers and lecturers that are supposed to be using the cart to educate.
"From a historical perspective, black education has been at a disadvantage,” he said.
In colonial times, missionaries provided education. In 1948, things started changing with apartheid and the idea of segregation. HF Verwoerd was the minister of education and of Bantu education at the time.
In Bantu education, which replaced missionary education, science and maths was deemed unnecessary. This meant the quality of education in "black schools” went down during apartheid.
"Missionary-educated black teachers were very competent,” said Webb.
Evidence of this can be seen in the Mbeki's and Mandela's of the ANC who are well educated, he said.
At the time, schools were not only separated by race but also by language.
Webb said the Soweto riots of 1976 were a critical turning point. General public perception is that this was a spontaneous uprising against Afrikaans as the main teaching language. However Webb believes the teachers were behind this. He thinks they quickly realised that the prime consideration was education of the youth, and got back to teaching.
The ANC saw teachers who wanted to do so as stooges for the regime. Some were killed and some left, he said. The matrics from the previous year would return to teach the next matrics and the quality of teaching went down.
He said South Africa getting left behind in global education trends was a result of Christian National education.
In the 1980s, New Zealand was trying Outcome Based Education (OBE) and Britain and Australia were using it with slightly more success.
"OBE is a highly sophisticated system and needs trained people to implement it,” said Webb.
He suggested a top-down approach where universities start using OBE, and then it can be filtered down to school level.
Webb said in 1994 when the South African Democratic Teachers Union came to the fore, all civil servants retained their jobs and there was a huge influx of teachers. In an effort to remove unqualified teachers, the ANC offered severance packages. Instead the result was that many good teachers left.
"There have been attempts to retrain teachers. However OBE is a far more difficult intellectual system to understand and it is more labour intensive,” he said.
Webb explained that modern education places emphasis on what gets students to learn.
"Students will always learn for the test,” said Webb to much laughter.
"The question is, ‘What do we want students to learn?'”
He suggested that in a world of so much content, students should learn the skills to access content.
"What is it about my course that I want students to have at their disposal? What do I set in assessment tasks for them to achieve outcomes?”
He believes it is important to get to a point where students are able to assess themselves as well as their peers. He has used this approach in his own courses and found them to work.
He does however believe that dropping OBE at primary and secondary level is not the worst thing.
