Increasing the effectiveness of South Africa’s schooling

Excellence is a consequence of voluntary exchanges and actions on the part of freely acting individuals pursuing their own goals with enthusiasm and dedication. Government prescription is incapable of bringing about excellence, and this is especially true in the field of education: both teaching and learning.

The time has come to challenge education entrepreneurs to cure SA’s education malaise and for the government to create a statutory, regulatory and fiscal environment conducive to the establishment of alternative educational options for the young people of this country.

Acquiring knowledge and skills is deeply personal and closely tied to the abilities, personal attributes and interests of the individual. Optimum learning conditions for young people consist of environments in which their personal capacities are challenged and enhanced. The personal attributes of individuals are so diverse that they cannot be catered for in a conventional government school, which must of necessity provide for the mythical ‘average student’ – an individual who does not exist.

A teacher once told me that he had no option but to concentrate his attention on the ‘middle range’ of students in his class. ‘The kids at the bottom of the class are going to fail anyway, so there is no point in wasting time on them,’ he said, ‘and the bright ones can make it on their own, so I don’t spend much time on them either.’ On being pressed, he admitted that students ‘at the bottom of the class’ tended to become aggressive and indulge in deviant behaviour while some at the ‘top of the class’ became bored stiff and disruptive, even failing examinations because of a lack of interest in what was going on in the classroom. The teacher hated having to adopt this callous attitude but had no way of getting through the work if he did not. He quit teaching.

Prescription must stop if education is to become the inspirational and exciting process that the youth have a right to expect. Decision-making about the nature, content and everything else related to schooling must be transferred to the young people themselves and their parents. As purchasers of education they, in turn, will be influenced by the careers the various education options will open up. Stated differently, schooling must be demand-driven and not provider-driven.

Government-monopoly spheres of activity are provider-driven. Politicians and government officials who dictate to consumers are guided by their own preferences rather than the preferences of consumers. If committees of experts are called in to assist in decision-making regarding the nature, quality, price, method of delivery and other factors involved in the delivery of services, the recommendations will tend to represent the preferences of the experts rather than that of the consumers. The only way to discover real consumer preferences is to observe the choices they make between alternative products and services offered to them by providers competing freely for their business.

In his book, The Russians, Hedrick Smith, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times in the 1970s reported: ‘In spite of the various tinkering reforms, the Soviet economy still operates by Plan from above rather than in response to consumer demand from below and this produces a lopsided assortment of goods. Sometimes the anomalies are baffling. Leningrad can be overstocked with cross-country skis and yet go several months without soap for washing dishes.’ In 1971, Leonid Breshnev announced that ‘Our plan is to make the life of the Soviet people still better, still more beautiful, and still more happy’. According to Smith, despite the promises, the Soviet woman continued to spend two hours in queues, seven days per week, shopping for basic necessities for her family – a direct result of the fact that government was the supplier of all goods.

Schooling worldwide ‘operates by Plan from above rather than from consumer demand’ and that is why it continues to fail large numbers of young people and make their lives miserable. Truancy, bullying, juvenile delinquency, functional illiteracy and a host of other problems can be overcome by abandoning the current formula. However, the visible problems are not necessarily the most tragic part of the schooling process; the lives of the compliant majority are perhaps even more detrimentally affected by the frustration of being prevented from developing their personal talents and abilities from a young age

John Taylor Gatto, three-time award-winning New York City teacher of the Year, said of US schools that, ‘Government schools must be made to compete for tax dollars with every other form of schooling, old and new. Let parents and communities choose what kind of education they will buy. Trust the customers, they will correct our school problems with the power of the purse strings.’ In order for Gatto’s proposal to work, education entrepreneurs would have to be allowed to enter the education market and supply, without prescription from government, the kind of education and skills training that parents and their children want.

In keeping with the trend in other countries such as Canada and the United States, government should also create opportunities for low-income students to attend alternative schools by paying their school fees, in effect allowing them to take the tax rands with them that would otherwise have been spent on them in government schools.

Trust the customers, as Gatto suggests, and they will transform schooling. Competition and choice will not improve only the prospects of those students attending alternative schools; it will also improve the education provided in government schools. Wherever real competition in schooling has been introduced, government schools have improved their standards. For private schools to provide ‘real’ competition they need the freedom to develop alternative products and methods of delivery to meet the demands of students, parents and future employers: they therefore have to be freed from curriculum prescriptions, prescribed teaching methods and any other constraints that would interfere with their efforts to deliver excellence in education.

Such programmes have delivered excellent results elsewhere and could do the same in SA.

Author: Eustace Davie is a director of the Free Market Foundation. This article may be republished without prior consent but with acknowledgement to the author. The views expressed in the article are the author's and are not necessarily shared by the members of the Foundation.

FMF Feature Article / 05 May 2009