Take out the red pens...

The examinations are upon us. Many children are unprepared to sit these exams and pass. What has happened over the last few years that our children no longer have the skills to read, write properly or even comprehend the questions posed?

That the standards once applied have lowered is beyond dispute. That the children are weaker academically than ever before is evident. That many students see 30 percent as a pass for a subject is terrifying.That many students who have been in our schooling system for 12 years still struggle to attain 40 percent for English as a Home Language is heartbreaking.

The impact of the Outcomes Based Education System on our youth is now a great big Albatross around our teachers' necks. Changes in a system as unwieldy as the South African National Education Department, take years to impact. The 2011 academic year is almost upon us and once again we will face the new year with uncertainty. The curriculum will be tweaked, not transformed, in 2012. Billions of rands will be spent on new teaching and learning resources.

Once again I must state that, in the end, the education system, curriculum and students' results depend on the quality of the teaching that takes place in a particular school or system. Principals need to be one step ahead of the curriculum changes. We need to reintroduce the basics, refine the allocated times for numeracy and literacy on our timetables and make sure that the good old fashioned methods that worked are still applied.

It is quite simple really, teachers should cover the assessment tasks for moderation and CASS purposes and minimise the areas that have brought about the crisis we now face. Group work should be kept to a minimum over the next few years while we try to improve the performance of individual students in our classes. The consequences for failing to do homework should be immediate and act as a deterrent. Projects and assignments should be marked on content and presentation of facts and not dependent on what the assignment look like at a glance.

Over the last few years, many teachers have made the fatal mistake of giving marks at face value. Students have been so obsessed with handing in projects that are colorful and attractive that they have failed to apply the necessary research and reference skills which they should be learning when they are researching their assignment. Teachers have fallen into the trap too. We allow children to submit beautifully typed work and are blinded to the plagiarism contained therein. We accept printed graphics, charts and graphs as illustrations. A child who has cut and pasted a graph or diagram of the life cycle of a frog, for example, has learned nothing other than the cut and paste function.

If we are to save our youth from a bleak future of illiteracy and innumeracy, we need to act fast. 2011 could be the start of our embracing the basics, drilling the things that need to be learned by rote like the times tables, insisting that children use reference books and not just Google searches for their research.

It is time to cast off the fluff and irrelevant window dressing that the OBE system has created and start teaching again, like we did before the RNCS, the Curriculum 2005, the Revised curriculum, and every other variation attempted to mask the fact that OBE has failed in our country.