The words of a popular old song come to mind as I write this. It goes, "Teach your children well..." Well we seem to have been doing that in South Africa just recently.
As if the teachers' strike did not do enough damage, the class of 2010 is now imitating their teachers and taking to the streets. Their cause - their teachers let them down at a crucial stage of their matric year; just three weeks before the very important Preliminary examinations. Their "demand"- a "free" 25% towards their final CASS (Continuous Assessment mark).
We can blame the teachers for setting a poor example, we can blame the government for not paying teachers decent wages in the first place or we bemoan the fact that history does repeat itself as we watch the modern-day post apartheid students face the wrath of the security forces brought in to quell the students' not so peaceful protests; or we could look at the root cause of this 2010 "student uprising".
The root of the children's fear is that they will fail matric. That many learners will indeed fail matric goes without saying. What we need to ask ourselves, however is how three short weeks of lost tuition time spread across twelve long years of formal schooling, could have such a disastrous impact on our final examination results?
The answer is quite simple. With the final matric examination being the only reliable benchmark of learner performance we have in our country; many teachers from the lower grades (Grade R to 11) rest on their laurels and offer sub-standard instruction and tuition and get away with it.
South Africa's schools are in crisis. Our schooling system is an embarrassment to our new Government and our country as a whole. That intervention is needed is obvious; that it should have happened "yesterday" is not really acknowledged.
We need to start from the bottom up. We need to hold teachers responsible for their learners' results, from as early as Grade R. We need to give teachers the power to decide if a child is ready to proceed to the next grade with his or her "age cohort" of not.
We need real evaluation strategies to determine a teacher's effectiveness or ineffectiveness. We need to reward the professionals teachers who do their job well and dismiss those who do not.
Government needs to stop cow-tying to Unions and start addressing teachers directly, in the workplace. Teachers' Unions collect millions of rands in membership fees each month. With this amount of economic and political clout, surely a trade union representing an entire profession, could negotiate with the state to improve conditions of service for teachers without calling a chalk-down? If we all did our work properly and our final examination results improved would this not be a more effective bargaining tool than taking to the streets?
It is high time that the Department of Education enforced the IQMS system in the manner in which it was intended - as a reward for those whose performance is above average as far as teaching is concerned. In the Eastern Cape year after year, every teacher regardless of their results, is given a minimal 1.5% bonus which is supposedly a performance-based reward. That performance has not been properly monitored or evaluated is ignored.
What are we teaching our children ? That one can be rewarded without any effort and without any measurement of one's performance? No wonder our children do not see the irony in demanding marks for "free".
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