The education crisis in South Africa

After the debacle of the matric results in South Africa this year, it is not surprising that both employers and tertiary institutions lack faith in government statistics on school leavers. It appears that although the pass rate has remained largely the same, the quality of graduates have decreased tremendously over the last 5 years.

If the South African department of education spent more time focusing on the core issues facing the youth in this country, and less time trying to 'normalise' the pass rate statistics, everyone would be better off. I've made a Naledi Pandor cartoon covering popular sentiment in South Africa over her effectiveness in her current role and the apparent success of outcome-based education - do check it out and drop your comments!

Future of education in South Africa

Created a comic for the Wonkie cartoon blog for today after a short break from the cartooning over the last week. Given my background the topic is very close to my heart - education. In fact, it's on what I see as the failure of outcome based education in South Africa.

At first I thought it's because I grew up under and experienced the harsher traditional system that I feel the current system is to weak. Then reality set in when I was going through the graduate hiring process at my previous job. I won't go into the depth of the commentary here as I've covered in much detail on Wonkie.. but suffice it to say that school should replicate the real world environment as much as possible. Comparing relative to yourself is great if you want to be the Buddha, but if you need to survive in the real world and bring food to the table - OBE is just not going to cut it.