Systemic

I had a discussion tonight with Klasie de Wet, my current host & the principal of the high school where I’ll start teaching this week. We were talking about so many flaws in the free eductaion South Africa is attempting to provide its young, While there are over 12 national languages, all education up to grade 3 must be provided in the “mother tongue” of the area. Here that means Sotho (pronounced soo-too) - although there are also children attending school that come from families where only Tswana, Zulu or Xhosa are spoken. After Grade 3, English becomes the predominant learning language. The problems start here because in these small farm towns there are often farm schools with poorly considered teaching ratios. These farm schools remain from private systems put in place by the farmers of the Apartheid era - they have since been taken over by government. So for instance, one school has 1 teacher and 5 pupils while another has 2 teachers and 70 pupils. These primary schools span grades 1 -6 and, for the 2-teacher school, the students are split up into grades 1-3 and the other 4-6. Now the teacher covering 1-3 must deal with 3 grade levels, all basic subject matter and must be present the material in Sotho (even though that may not be the first language for many pupils). Then, take the teacher working with grades 4-6. Whilst all basic subjects must be covered in English, most pupils cannot grasp the material in English…so they resort to teaching in Sotho and the students go on to High School never fully learning English. On top of all these things, many of the teachers may not have studied math or science in their grade school education and cannot, therefore, teach their students this material. So primary aged students go on to high school where it is mandatory to study in English, as all exams are written in this language - however they go on without having ever properly mastered English, math or science.