Another year is wasting away in innumerable
township havens of poverty’s sting paralyzing our country’s economy, and young
adults and their children are camping under faded trees with dreams burnt dry
by the heavy rays of failure.
Many having given to drink and others
suicide, schools are a distant memory or a distant prospect in a world known
for perpetual plight and misery.
Last year’s student protestations left
college gates choking with aspirant scholars who cannot be accommodated and
while townships sink into disparate mires of criminal infestation, these
monuments of the education industrial complex fleece millions of students who
cannot even afford a loaf of bread.
Destitute young women will soon be parading
bellies ripening with fatherless fetuses, while the mining industrial complex reassembles
and repurposes desperation of lethargic young males towards its own damning
tortures fueled by narcissistic dreams.
It cannot be denied that in less than three
decades, we have observed a catastrophic demise of the South African education
system, which has by all means been under siege due to a number of factors and
inevitable alterations in the objective demands guiding our country’s
democratic project.
Constitutional mandates required hordes of
black students to make it through colleges and universities, and through this
race for a skilled workforce, many compromises had to be made and valuable
integrity traded for rapid inclusion into the radical economic development
machine.
When global education is seemingly
flourishing in other economies, South Africa’s education institutions are now
imploding, and a process of de-development is underway from kindergarten to
lecture halls.
Observe how the auspicious move towards raising
graduate numbers among black pupils has seen an opposite effect, where many
black students realized that they were utilized as pawns in the initial stages
of the devaluation of educational content for the creation of factory workers
consumed by debt and unreachable dreams.
And now our country is experiencing a
drop-out boom, and a vast number of matriculants are not even equipped to enter
tertiary level education due to sub-standard education inculcated throughout
basic and secondary education stages.
While the higher education industry is
advocating for more financial inclusion of under-resourced and needy students,
many young people are resisting because they now recognize college education as
an over-priced social marker than a tool in their pursuit for personal goals of
‘a good life’.
The brittle or broken education system
needs to admit that it also failed by watering down classical education for
mass consumption of the previously disadvantaged black people at primary and
secondary school levels.
The so-called Outcome Based Education
system has inadvertently created a crisis of illiterate automatons who seldom
can spell, read or critically analyze any written text from a logical stand
point.
The root of these failures lies with the
people entrusted with running these institutions; most of them being products
of other mediocre education systems of course, but what is the purpose of this
stupefying mediocritization of our present curricula disseminated at primary
and secondary school?
Does our government mean to work this hard
and expensively to create an under-educated population?
Where does our country’s education system rank
in world ratings for best science for instance, or mathematics, biology and
other classical studies which produce diverse experts of international renown?
As opposed to our present state run
compulsory schooling, I believe schools should aim to be vestiges of classical
education, but over the past couple of decades our education has been
inextricably tied to capitalist global psychological warfare agenda, whose main
weapon of engagement is always media.
The entertainment industrial complex is
unquestionably more pervasive in townships where it creates reality bubbles
which deny true realities of poverty, exploitation and economic servitude any
consideration by minds obsessed with Beyonce’s hairstyle.
And some of these dreams proliferated
through media, these consumerist tendencies bred by a staple diet of exuberant
affluence are what has created a fast food education system through which many
imagine quick fixes towards economic emancipation.
Fictional wars are fought by gaming
teenagers avoiding ‘homework’, through joystick adrenalin injections and fake
bullets maiming characters in virtual battle zones.
But what happens when our entertainment is
pent of programming a militarized population who will never flinch at the sight
of blood?
Our schools seem to continually weaponise
knowledge themselves, creating competitive automatons who are only experts in
specific fields of study and therefore work, who cannot branch out of
compartmentised utilization of their mental faculties.
Schools have truly become prisons with
books.
Many economists often attribute the low
wage growth in the country to educational stagnation and a tertiary education
system that prepares the next generation for jobs that won’t exist.
On the cusp of this ‘a dropout revolution’ as we can call this new
paradigm of social transformation, many graduates for instance, now feel
obsolete in today’s information economy and many are joining the unemployed
emerging from either professional or informal work that is now performed by
overseas sweatshop slave labor or by machines.
And a great number seldom recovers from
joblessness of course, when living within an economy relegated to ‘Junk Status’
by ratings agencies, with an ever exploding population inundated with poverty
and ceaseless unemployment.
And what we are now observing is a counter
stance where many have embraced a freedom to fail, dropouts getting pregnant
and giving birth to children without homes and family support.
Young men will be joining their unemployed
fathers and uncles at shebeens to suppress the ever growing depression that
yields many powerless and despotic.
How the majority of disenfranchised youth
react to the incipient economic biases created by defective educational
initiatives is yet to be witnessed, more intensely and violently than the
recent fees protestations.
What I find it interesting as well is how
the bank(ruptcy)ing system’s generosity is becoming increasingly linked to ‘higher
rates of entrepreneurship’ through loans and over-drafts to newly employed
adults, and having seen how many efforts by the youth are towards battling the
stranglehold of pennilessness, indeed poverty has created an ever increasingly desperate
breed of entrepreneurs and loan seekers.
Anarchist squatters are mushrooming in
every city across the country, mainly comprising of politicized youth who have
been discarded by the wage system, education system and even family systems. And
not surprisingly, the anxiety about the invalidity of ballot promises has also
given these disenfranchised masses a common enemy in this age of plenty for a
few.
Desktop employment is otherwise the
alternative cult among those who cannot do professions which require brain work,
and of course, this could justifiably be labeled as another superstitious wish
and a philosophical tabloid preached by yet another deranged evangelist of a
type of school system that
NEVER numbs down our human intelligence.
But let our INTELLIGENCE GROW as we will
it.
