As South Africa’s post-apartheid education has fluctuated between philosophies, it has struggled in its relationship with time.
In 1998, with good intent, Curriculum 2005 (C2005) became the proverbial cart before the horse. Outcomes-based education (OBE) failed its learners, not because of its philosophy, but because a fledgling democracy lacked the infrastructure to handle an ambitious educational model. In essence, the timing was too soon.
Fast forward three decades to our current educational landscape: against the tenures of the late Kader Asmal and long-serving Angie Motshekga, under the present education minister, Siviwe Gwarube, the horse seems back in front.
Now, though, the curriculum is galloping ahead, leaving learners anxiously holding on.
When C2005 ended, the education department opted for the Revised National Curriculum Statement (RNCS) and then to the Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) in 2012. Continuous Assessment (CASS) was enforced as the metric of choice – an assessment model prescriptive in spirit, strictly dictating the pace of classroom testing and the mass of formal tasks.
The assessment treadmill
Naturally, continuous assessment is necessary for critical thinking. No sincere educator doubts this. In essence, CASS was adopted for this reason, replacing the high-stakes summative tasks with formative testing to better gauge learner progress. But progress must be gauged, not glanced at in a report: time must give way so that learning becomes the constant.
In many senses, critical thinking is a muscle, not a genetic trait. It thrives in a gym of time, not in a gym of speed. When a curriculum is too dense and the assessment schedule too rigid, learning becomes compliance and deadlines become its master. In many respects, this has been my experience with CAPS. In fact, ask any teacher what stresses them most and the majority will say it is their racing to finish the syllabus against the mandates of a rigid assessment structure.
A conservative number of assessments in Grade 8 is around twenty.
In a term.
Multiply that by 4 terms and you’re looking at around 80 to 90 formal tasks in a school year. That is Grade 8.
The Matric timetable is as dense, and to fit everything in, some schools have removed Grade 12 excursions and activities; a sad reality given the lessons these experiences can teach.
Time is necessary to Bloom
Any high school teacher has heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy. The famous Educational Psychologist, Benjamin Bloom, spent his career studying the human mind, especially through the lens of assessment and wrote his book Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in 1956.
While the DBE uses Bloom’s taxonomy as its assessment metric, Bloom’s intent was not to prescribe a rigid testing formula, but rather to devise a progressive developmental framework for deep thinking and learning. Of course, he was not against assessment. But he championed the necessity of time for the achievement of his ideals writing : ‘Most students can master what we have to teach them, but the single most critical variable is time. A rigid, uniform pacing system is the enemy of deep comprehension.’
While learners with natural academic ability may thrive, the density of the curriculum suggests that a majority are hurried to and through matric at a pace too quick to manage. Learners like these experience Bloom as a rubric, not a teaching philosophy with the potential to guide them upwards to more developed ways of thinking. The realities of such shortcomings are best exemplified at the annual marking sessions ever year.
December marking highlights the peak of Grade 12 ability and South Africa produces incredible talent. Yet while this is true, there exists a sobering reality: groups of learners who show sincerely compromised levels of lower and higher order thinking. Sure, this can be expected. But what is interesting are the almost verbatim blocs of information betraying any sense of thought or developed opinion. Clearly, in the race to finish the curriculum, many learners have been taught what to think rather than how – an interesting, but sad, irony given that rote learning is not on the list of goals for the DBE.
Feedback and the time to sigh
The driving principle behind Bloom’s theory evinced a framework where teacher feedback was staple and where the time to develop thinking patterns was inherent. In other words, the locus of learning was not in the repetition of tasks but in the post-test space where learners could understand where they went wrong or right. The true value of assessment was not in grading students, but in providing feedback and correctives at each stage in the teaching-learning process. Such a practice requires time.
The current CASS framework, however, forces learners to race from one assessment to the next. Time is given to explain and to perform the test but never really to provide feedback; the very dialogue necessary to provoke thought. Such dialogue is also where education becomes personal; where learners get to sigh at their mistakes and reflect on their discoveries.
So, when this space is removed can we really expect learners to produce deeper thinking patterns? And when they complete tasks without teacher feedback, are they exhibiting critical thinking or regurgitating their own inherent set of skills? If the latter, perhaps the current curriculum is producing what C.S. Lewis termed “ghastly simplicity”: where repetition without feedback removes the organ and demands the function. Here, we deny learners the time to process and correct their mistakes while at the same time expect high-levels of thinking. It is sad to think how many learners experience education as a contract between what the teacher must teach and what they must pass. On this treadmill, not only is the value of education reduced, but the potential for a genuine learner-teacher relationship is compromised.
I recall a history lesson which ventured off into debate. Amicable but heated, learners were keen to express their own points of view. But towards the back, one learner sat crying softly. Her response revealed a sad reality: ‘sir, how is this discussion going to help us pass?’ I couldn’t blame her. There is much to consider about the mental framework of not only this girl but the many other learners who come to school as victims of knowledge rather than its heirs; and without the time to develop their opinion nor find their voice. As much as the DBE aims for critical thinking, the pace and rigidity of its curriculum make it difficult to realize.
A nation’s healing and a learner’s time
Hailing a quick fix for South African education is perhaps naïve. Its array of cultures and unique nuances make a ‘one-size-fits-all’ curriculum hard to fathom. Here, we must be cautious not to lay the blame entirely on the DBE. Rather, we should seek a system that explores a middle-ground and where the soul of learning returns to scale the walls of schooling. Such realities are not governed by tasks but by a curriculum with the time to breathe. When this happens, the humanity of education will return to its classrooms.
Speaking at a recent education symposium, Professor Jonathan Jansen captured this necessity well when he said: “Subject advisers want compliance, not learning, and that is the greatest danger to the health of the education system.”
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The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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