Skip to main content

Just a short rant

 
Today I learned that 90% of the eighth grade thinks that the sun goes around the earth, and I spent a good hour trying to convince them otherwise. They stared at me, sullenly uncomprehending, like I was speaking Greek, and impolitely to boot.

More and more I am realizing the preposterousness of the South African education system. Yesterday I went to the neighboring village to check out the high school and see how it goes. I watched Andy (another PCV) teach a couple classes (quite well, I might add). Then we went to check out the various classes, to see how many teachers there were in class. It was then that I got a first glimpse of the matric test, the test that the entire 12th grade must take.

It’s brutally, absurdly hard. Most of the math was stuff I hadn’t seen in years, tricky algebra and second-year calculus. There’s a fat dollop of organic chemistry that I didn’t see until sophomore year in college, and a lot of college physics as well. If I could describe it in American context, it’s like the AP calculus BC, chemistry, physics, biology, English, foreign language, and mechanical design tests combined. Only the 3-4 smartest people I knew in high school could have done well (in my opinion). I’d bet that not a single one of the teachers in my village could pass well enough to go to college. Of course, passing is only 33%, but to go to college one has to do better than that.

The whole system is set up to ensure cascade failure for the students. Starting in 9th grade they take tests in all 11subjects, and if they don’t pass the math they are forever shunted into “maths literacy,” which is like math for poets, with no way to make it back into the real class. It’s bad enough to have the matric as the be-all, end-all of the future of a student, but to have a test that I would regard as wildly inappropriate for an American landing on these poor rural students…it’s outrageous.

There are more little things. Like how the curriculum demands that every subject should receive a set amount of time, but the percentages are strange (one subject is 7%), so the schedule is different every day of the week. This isn’t followed, of course, but it seems out of the question to suggest that maybe we should say “screw the government, let’s make up our own timetable,” so it’s just improvised every day.

What a mess. But if my students someday realize that the Earth goes around the sun, I suppose I can consider this a success.
Posted by Picasa

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that