Who has failed a generation?

In an article in Business Day today, Cosatu general secretary secretary, Zwelinzima Vavi calls the Limpopo textbook "fiasco" a national "own goal"..."and showed how the working class and the poor suffered when leaders "defocussed" from challenges ordinary people faced daily".
Absolutely. And that would not just be the leaders in the teachers union, SADTU, which should have been first to know that textbooks had not been delivered in Limpopo. But the Department of Education too. Considering education and health are the two biggest items on the national budget, one would think that making sure that the millions spent on textbooks was actually seeing a return on investment. So let's wait to see whose heads will roll for this.
I'm pretty sure Angie won't be staying in her role as Minister of Basic Education.
But let's look to the teachers at these schools now. Did they go through the correct channels in complaining about the lack of resources? Did they try and make a plan, taking the initiative to finding materials themselves? Or has the handout mentality also reached those people expected to teach the leaders of tomorrow?
To be fair, teachers have it tough. Not only do they have to deal with rowdy children, some schools don't have running water, electricity - or even enough desks and pens for children.
And then we get the changed curriculum.
Over 10 years on, the Department of Education  realised that Outcomes Based Education (OBC) doesn't work and it's time to go back to the traditional input-based system that we were thankfully still part of.You think!! Especially considering it has been tried and tested in various other countries - and ultimately considered a failure (Canada and Australia are just two examples).

In a thought leader piece published in 2009 Why OBE has not worked in South Africa, Bert Oliver points out the following:

• "The way that OBE has been implemented in South Africa seems to me to have had the effect of having systematically shifted the focus away from the actual teaching to all the (to my mind largely redundant) administration, archiving, reporting, and all the rest of it, which comprise nothing less than what Foucault called a system of panoptical surveillance".

• "OBE seems to be blindly predicated on the assumption that teachers can teach like machines, in a time and space unaffected by normal, to-be-expected eventualities. But such things do occur in the normal course of events — that is what it means to be (finitely) human."

In Youth sacrificed for OBE (July 2010), Times Live journalists reported that "after 12 years of massive educational failures and the waste of millions of rands, the ANC has dumped Outcomes-Based Education.

And so OBE was replaced with Caps - the National Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement. According to the education department's website, Caps is:

"a single, comprehensive and concise policy document, which will replace the current Subject and Learning Area Statements, Learning Programme Guidelines and Subject Assessment Guidelines for all the subjects listed in the National Curriculum Statement Grades R - 12.  Interestingly, there hasn't been an update on the curriculum newsletter since May 2011..... Right so there's a new curriculum that teachers have to be trained in to be able to teach. Of course, there are problems like Gauteng teachers taking time off their winter holidays to be training on Caps only to find that there were no workbooks when they got there.  - Glitches at curriculum training sites  So where am I going with this? Basically, I wish for the following: 1. Government admit that they were wrong in trying to implement such a silly system 2. Now provide the resources for teachers to (a) be proficient in teaching to then (b) teach the curriculum  3. Go back to the days of old and push money into standalone teaching colleges and begin a drive to promote teaching as a viable and noble profession - both at school and university level 4. Pay teachers enough to allow them to live at a comfortable level and not give up trying because there's just no point 5. De-unionise the profession. Teaching needs to become an essential service thus not allowing strikes - which have long-term and disastrous effects 6. Provide resources for schools....yes, that would include text books please! 7. Everyone - government and citizens of South Africa to declare a state of emergency on education - and actively seek to do something about it. Because if they - and we - don't, what hope is there for the future of our country?