South Africa needs to ditch the archaic approach to the education debate: either fix the basics or gear for the future. Public schools must do both as discrete and disconnected content knowledge gives way to more integrated and applied learning over the next decade. The matric class of 2025 atSilikamva High Schoolbrought joy and pride to the community of Imizamo Yethu in Hout Bay.
The school achieved a 100% pass rate, with three-quarters of matric pupils obtaining a bachelor’s pass. Just six years ago, the pass rate was just 40%. Silikamva is a Collaboration School in the Western Cape, in which the principal and staff work together with a school operating partner – in this caseCommon Good– to improve pupil outcomes and wellbeing.
The other mainstream high schools taking part in this provincial initiative,Apex EersteriverandKraaifontein, obtained pass rates of 98% and 89% respectively, the latter 32 percentage points up from 2023. These results were not achieved by weeding out the weakest pupils before their final Grade 12 exams to exaggerate the successes of the school. On the contrary, these schools believe in the worth of every child and try to provide each one of them with the fullest educational experience possible.
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Critics of Collaboration Schools say that they undermine parental control of the SGB and open public schools to commercial profiteering. They are unpersuaded by the fact that the entire parent body decides if and when the school should join or leave the programme, or that communities themselves opted for 50-50 partnership so that operating partners can’t make the excuse that they lack the power to co-create change. Those detractors point tocountrieswhere fly-by-night profiteers provide trash-schooling to the poorest children, or where publicly funded private operators cherry-pick the brightest children for admission toboost their results.
Certainly, these are valid global concerns as education becomes increasingly commodified. However, they don’t apply to Collaboration Schools, which are based on principles of nonprofit support to no-fee public schools offering non-selective admission to children within their catchment areas. Collaboration Schools show how the wider capabilities of communities can be harnessed for the benefit of education.
This is vital as the wider role of teachers is changing, from telling children what to remember to teaching them how to think – from conveyors of a prepackaged curriculum to connecting them to diverse and dynamic sources of knowledge. As discrete and disconnected content knowledge gives way to more integrated and applied learning over the next decade and as pupils increasingly draw on the vast digital memory banks of the internet,how we think will change. Our boxed and mechanistic thinking will give way to more fluid “dialectical reasoning” where ideas are constantly tested and refined.
Schools will be viewed less as bastions of learning – insulated and aloof – and more as community incubators for social and business enterprise, as local nodes in global networks of knowledge. Effective learning will require facilitated access to open knowledge networks and routine interaction with social innovators, environmental problem-solvers, entrepreneurs and future employers. At the same time, artificial intelligence will continue to blur the origins and veracity of information, and the ability of pupils to distinguish between objectively justifiable views and opinion will prove as foundational as literacy and numeracy.
In this fast-changing environment, school management and governance systems will also need to change. School executives and SGBs must continue to ensure that external ideas and influences are negotiated in a safe and nurturing environment for children. But the notion that principals, parents and teachers could hold all the expertise to run a school – that they should not draw on the strategic thinking and decision-making capabilities of others both in and beyond their communities – is already becoming archaic.
Sceptics will challenge this futuristic vision and bring us down to Earth with the realities of residual pit toilets, dilapidated schools and foundational failings in numeracy and literacy. But the future is now, and public schooling could fall increasingly behind the pace of real education unless they prime themselves for these new ways of learning. As Silikamva High has shown, smart management can tackle basic shortcomings and seize new learning opportunities at the same time.
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