African Education

We were sitting in the shebeen on Saturday night, as usual, and the talk got around to education. Why, despite 11 years of black rule, do the blacks still consistently do badly, and the whites still do well? Yes, I know, the legacy of Apartheid. But really, the answer is simple (If we are prepared to stop fooling ourselves – and we don’t fool ourselves in the shebeen. It’s a great place to hear what people are rally thinking). First, you have to accept that blacks are different from whites. They have different knee joints, different hip joints, different immunity systems, different noses. The differences are so great that the medical research fraternity are now having to differentiate between white and black samples, despite their disgust at the moral reprehensibility of it. Ask yourself, then, is it likely, despite the proven physiological differences, and thousands of years of evolutionary separation, that we think the same as whites, and that our brains function the same? Probably not. In fact, definitely not! The chances are so small that we can ignore them as negligible. So how on earth do we think we can compete and beat, or even match whites in an education system designed by them for them? The chances of that happening were always minute. I understand that we have a lower IQ also (read “Bell Curve” for proof), but again, a test designed for whites. As an analogy you might say lions are clever, because they hunt in packs and can eat giraffe, which are bigger. In an IQ test designed for lions, the lions would beat the giraffes. But the giraffes are much better at being giraffes than lions are, and similarly, the lions would score lower on a giraffe IQ test than giraffes. So what I’m saying is that we make second rate whites, but we make first rate blacks. So why keep trying to be whites? The solution then is to design an education system from scratch more suited to us. Maybe an improved version of our traditional methods, and I mean pre-colonialism. A starting point could also be to identify exactly how we differ from whites on our thinking and intelligence, and maybe I can throw some light on it, by relating to experiences I had. I spoke to this old white guy who spends a lot of time and effort training Technikon students at his factory. One day he took a dismantled Landrover gearbox, and said to the students that they must each assemble it. He had an assembly drawing for them to work from. He was disgusted that none could do it. So he showed them. After the demonstration, somewhat surprisingly to him, all of them could do it perfectly. It turned out that they had memorised what he did, and merely repeated his actions, ignoring the assembly drawing. Now apparently to a white, this is unbelievable from a few points of view. First, they can’t believe what good memories the students must have. Second, they can’t understand how the students don’t prefer to use the assembly drawing to refer to, instead of the seemingly difficult task of memorising everything. Another time I spoke to a white university engineering lecturer. He set a test, where the question was similar to that the students had done during class, except he changed the numbers. A number of students wrote down exactly the same solution from the class, complete with same figures as in class. Being white, He was astounded at their memory, even though they had to get no marks. He found it unbelievable that they chose to learn that way, and even more unbelievable that they had done so successfully. So my hypothesis is simply this; one difference (there are surely many more) in the way we think is that we have good memories and powers of recall, and we like to use it. Whites seem to have better pattern recognition abilities, therefore excel at maths. So you should always do what you’re relatively good at, for example, if you’re artistic, be an artist, not an engineer. Same with us blacks.

The universities are under great pressure to improve the pass rate, most particularly in engineering, according to the same engineering lecturer. But no matter what they try, the students are still failing in droves. Finally, under pressure from above, they are allowing students more years to complete the course, and allowing them credits for courses with only a 50% mark. This improved the situation, but not enough. This also amounts to standard lowering, and is not the right thing to do. The standards must be kept high, no matter what. A new engineering course can be designed for blacks, which is designed from the outset to work on their strengths. Then you don’t have to call the degree the same thing, to ensure you differentiate it from the traditional degree. And who knows, maybe it will become more highly valued than the traditional degree for certain job types. In any case, you’ll know what you’re getting, and you won’t end up with a second rate traditional engineering degree. Traditional engineering degrees can be maintained for mainly whites.

From what I know, all black learning and history came down from generation to generation by word of mouth, from elders to youngers, carried in excellent memories. Now we’re all thrown into white schools to learn white subjects in a completely different way. Surely, especially here in SA, we have enough whites to be whites, and we can concentrate on doing things we’re likely to be good at, maybe such as history, and biology? Maybe taught at the knee of teachers, as elders may have done? In any case, we should identify our differences, and work on our strengths. We’re certainly good at whingeing and making the whites feel guilty, so let’s get them to fill in the gaps for us to have the type of society and nation we want. Might as well make use of them, since they still seem to be hanging around. Its time to stop trying to be whites, and time to start being the best blacks we can be. And I mean the best Xhosa, Zulu, or whatever we are too.