How dropping maths as a compulsory subject will harm SA
This makes me think of a scene in the movie Amadeus. Mozart learns from Salieri that some so-and-so has been chosen by the emperor as music teacher to his niece. Mozart is outraged: “But that could do actual harm to her musical development!” he shouts.
“Trust me,” says Salieri. “Nothing in the world could possibly do any harm to her musical development.”
Mozartean giggles ensue.
And thus it is now with our public education system. Nothing in the world can harm it anymore. You cannot damage a building that has already been demolished.
I think I know what they are on about. The issue is very simple: if you keep standards, then huge numbers of students fail, thus leading to clogged-up classes, where grade twos ranging in age from eight to seventeen sit, 120 of them in a class. Thus, you pass most, and they flow through the system, and seeing as they are illiterate anyway, what does it matter whether you required math as subject or not? Replacing the entire syllabus with one designed by Ken Ham would not make any difference at this stage.
Quote:
According to Balfour, pupils in grades 7-9 cannot know already whether they wish to pursue a career in maths or not, and this would in turn create a situation where, should the pupils decide to pursue maths, they would not be able to do so.
Trust me, Prof. Balfour, the chances that a kid who gets 30% for grade 9 maths is suddenly going to realize in matric that he wants to be an engineer are pretty slim. And if he does realize it then? What are the chances that he could make it anyway? He probably can’t read either.
I don’t know if this holds true for all humans, but my personal experience with kids in South Africa is that most of them quite simply do not have the ability to ever understand maths at matric level. In fact, I have only by very rare exception met anyone, including people with matric math, that could do simple applications of grade seven maths (e.g. work out how much water you can collect from a roof, given the roof’s dimensions and the rainfall). We might as well stop wasting their time.
The real problem here is that, perhaps partly due to promises made by liberation movements and now the governing party, kids’ ambitions and dreams far exceed their abilities and/or work ethic. Perhaps that is what we should work on then. Unfortunately, only parents can really do much about that. How many of us ever paid any heed to a word our teachers said to us?