Outcomes based education

I found this yesterday, to my absolute horror. I have 3 children, 2 currently in primary school. This OBE curriculum is crap. They really have NO idea how the children are actually coping, and the reports that are sent quarterly dont give an acceptable idea of how they are doing.

The syllabus itself is another issue, but having seen the work the are expected to perform, i can honestly understand the thousands of idiot matrics we currently have in our job markets. No offense, b they're stupid. Thick as 2 short planks with ZERO understanding of the world in which they live. Arbitrary example, eldest was taught that the bantu tribes lived in cities before the white man came ... (WTF?) and had sustainable farming in place .....

I digress. It's a fuck up. Pure and simple. No misunderstanding. The anc's bloody experiment with our future has failed, and we are all losers. I can only hope tat something changes soon, before we lose all rationality.

PS, universities are not coping with the low standards of education, and are also lowering standards, if only to try convince world at large that we are achieving something after the glorious revolution *spit*

Ditch OBE now, academics urge

November 02 2008 at 02:40PM

By Noelene Barbeau

In a week when thousands of school pupils are writing their matric exams, leading academics have slammed South Africa's outcomes-based education (OBE) system, calling it a waste of time and saying it should be ditched.

Among those calling for the jettisoning of the system is the American educator and self-proclaimed father of OBE, Dr William Spady.

Spady, who toured the country in 1997 addressing thousands of teachers about outcomes based education, said South Africa had "completely missed the boat" in understanding the concept.

He said he had distanced himself from the South African version of OBE

In an interview with the Tribune this week, he said that OBE could be used only when there were no time constraints and students could work at their own pace.

This, however was not the case in formal education, which was based on strict time schedules.

He said he had distanced himself from the South African version of OBE and described it as a "professional embarrassment".

Former University of Cape Town vice-chancellor, Dr Mamphela Ramphele, has also slammed the system.

"We have chosen the worst curriculum policy you could ever imagine," she raged at a meeting in Cape Town earlier this week. "Not a single country in this world that has undertaken outcomes based education has succeeded."

"Canada tried it, they dumped it. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and New Zealand tried it, they dumped it. Not us. No. If we make a mistake, we keep making it . . . Why? . . . Because we are afraid of people saying 'this inferior black-dominated government doesn't know what it is doing'."

Professor Jonathan Jansen, former Dean of Education at the University of Pretoria, asked who would take responsibility for this "curriculum mess" and the millions of rands spent on this "curriculum disaster". He said the curriculum changes were "a terrible decision that widened the gap between the children of the rich and the poor".

Spady is encouraging his South African colleagues to stop referring to OBE in any form, because it "never existed".

The OBE system, introduced from 1997, was intended to make a clean break with apartheid education.

"But all it has done is weaken the education system," said Ramphele, whose controversial book, Laying the Ghosts to Rest: Dilemmas of the transformation in South Africa was published earlier this year.

Explaining OBE, Spady said that "in the real world" OBE could be used only in training programmes for institutions like flight schools and karate, which were not time-based.

He said that at the time he had warned South African audiences that, from what he could see, the curriculum South Africa had chosen fell far short of these "fundamental features of the OBE paradigm".

"Had there been stronger conceptual understanding and agreement, I believe the educational leaders would have been able to make a more constructive choice about reforms they sought to implement during the first Mandela government," Spady said.

Duncan Hindle, the Director-General of Education, did not want to comment on Ramphele's OBE criticism without further information.

He said that in principle every system would be reviewed if required.

Introduced in 2002, it was revised by an education committee and approved by provincial MECs.

noelene.barbeau@inl.co.za
This article was originally published on page 1 of Tribune on November 02, 2008