DESTRUCTIVE IMPORTS – OVERSEAS FADS HINDER OUR PROGRESS
by Jack Bloom
Matric pupils this year write an exam on the curriculum that grew out of the outcomes-based education (OBE) approach first introduced in 1997.
OBE has a very mixed record in countries like Britain, Australia and New Zealand. It has been a disaster here, especially in poorer schools where teachers were inadequately trained in its implementation.
Education Minister Naledi Pandor sat in on a lesson where she wondered why the teacher never wrote anything on the board. The teacher said that she had been instructed that OBE means one should always face the class!
Textbooks were abandoned as OBE was interpreted to mean that there was no set curriculum, and teachers and pupils would jointly construct it.
This could only work in better-resourced schools where teachers were properly qualified and motivated.
In 2002, the Revised National Curriculum Statement reinstated textbooks and content, and reduced 66 outcomes to three.
Attention is returning to the teaching of basic literacy and numeracy in which we score miserably even compared to neighbouring countries like Swaziland and Lesotho.
Education is not the only area where overseas fads cause destructive impact.
Instead of routine testing and partner notification as with other sexually transmitted diseases, HIV/Aids prevention has been hampered by an excessive focus on the privacy rights of infected individuals as opposed to the rights of others not to be infected.
This was an import of the extreme political correctness that human rights activists imposed on efforts to combat HIV/Aids in America, insisting that it be treated separately from all other illnesses.
Lee Reichman of the New Jersey Medical School comments: "Traditional public health is absolutely effective at controlling infectious disease. It should have been applied to Aids from the start, and it wasn't. Long before there was Aids, there were other sexually transmitted diseases, and you had partner notification and testing and reporting."
In South Africa, Dr Kgosi Letlape, Chairperson of the SA Medical Association, observes bitterly that doctors would normally be guilty of malpractice if they failed to do all the tests for a correct diagnosis, but they cannot test without explicit permission when HIV/Aids is suspected.
It is a general trend imported from overseas to continually expand the definition of “rights”, which are elevated over duties. This has undermined the traditional values that are needed to reassert a vitally needed discipline in all areas of society.
Acceptance of personal responsibility is hindered by the message in many overseas movies and TV shows that criminality and bad behaviour are easily excused by poverty or parental abuse. Even the dumbest criminal will say in court “society made me do it”.
How have we ended up with legislation that prevents parents smacking their children but allows 12 year old girls to have an abortion and get contraceptives without parental consent or knowledge?
Meanwhile, our emerging nanny state seeks to ban public kissing by children younger than 16, and smoking by parents in a car with young children.
We are victims of the cultural imperialism of the Western political and intellectual elite who persist in what American scholar Thomas Sowell calls the “vision of the anointed”. This vision (and the policies that flow from it) is thoroughly defective but remarkably resilient to evidence of its failure.
We should stop falling for the remedies of those who trumpet their virtuous motives rather than real world results. Our room for error is far smaller than in developed countries, hence we should take care to choose the best ideas from them rather than the worst.
AUTHOR:Jack Bloom is the DA Leader in the Gauteng Legislature. This is an edition of his weekly newsletter ‘Rising Tide’
This article may be republished without prior consent but with a
| Posted on 13/2/2008
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