NONTOBEKO MTSHALI
SUBJECT selection for high schools pupils getting into the further education and training (FET) phase points to the route they might take in their post-school qualification.
The value that the subjects hold, in terms of the number of points they’re worth when students apply at higher education institutions, can be the difference between the student qualifying for the academic programme they want to pursue or not.
The selection process becomes problematic when pupils have to balance it against subjects they’re strong in and therefore likely to pass to get through matric.
Schools get their matric pass rate targets from the districts and provincial education departments on the marks they need to score.
So when Grade 9 pupils choose their subjects, it’s common for them to be encouraged or pressured by their schools to pick subjects they’re likely to pass – and not necessarily the ones they need to pursue in the FET programmes of their choice.
Maths literacy, which has been criticised as a “useless” subject, is one of the subjects pupils have been taking up either through coercion or for the sake of “passing.”
During the Mail & Guardian Critical Thinking Forum held in Joburg recently, education practitioners agreed that pupils were being pushed to take “unchallenging subjects to achieve good pass rates”, as Equal Education’s Lukhanyo Mangona put it.
“Children take maths lit because they think they’ll pass [and] not necessarily because it’s easy,” said Maggie Makgoba, president of the Professional Educators Union.
Speaking to The Star, Makgoba said maths lit was a sound concept on paper, founded on the fact that everyone, regardless of their academic ability, needed to be literate in maths.
“Even a soccer star needs to be literate in maths. Maths lit was meant to address the fact that all of us need to be [maths] literate,” Makgoba said.
Another problem, she added, was that most people considered the traditional academic route of enrolling with universities as the only viable option for post-school qualification.
“The academic route is not for everybody. We still need technical people like electrical engineers and technicians who can pursue their studies at FET colleges.
“Maths lit is suitable for such people who don’t need pure maths.”
Makgoba said the problem with maths in the schooling system was the shortage of suitably qualified teachers to teach pure maths.
“Because of the shortage of maths teachers, maths has been demonised as a difficult subject.”
During their interaction with high school teachers, Makgoba said, teachers admitted to teaching senior-grade pupils things they were supposed to have been taught in lower grades because the pupils don’t know the things they should.
“If you don’t have the basic skills to do pure maths, you can’t learn in high school. You need to grasp maths in the foundation phase.”
A research report by the Centre of Development and Enterprise titled “The Quantity and Quality of South Africa’s Teachers”, found that the teacher training system needed to produce about 15 000 more teachers a year than it does now, particularly in subjects such as maths, science, commerce and technology.
The report, which was published in September last year, also stated that many of the teachers teaching these subjects aren’t teaching them well “partly because many of them have been badly trained”.
Makgoba said the issue of children being forced to take maths lit because of low maths pass rates was exacerbated by the fact that pupils were assessed on their aptitudes only when they left the schooling system either in Grade 9 and 12.
She said external assessments should be introduced after each phase – after Grade 3 and 6, in Grade 9 and then in Grade 12.
“We only look at the pupil’s skills in Grade 12 [so] we don’t know what they know before then. The current system pushes pupils to Grade 12 [and] only after the pupils fail do they consider going to FET colleges,” she said.