What needs to be done.

For South Africans to become prosperous a number of things need to happen and they need to happen soon if any kind of improvement can be envisaged within the next thirty years.

Firstly, the quality of human being developed needs great improvement. The majority of children in this country have no idea who their father is, and those who think they know, are often wrong.

This is a huge problem in two ways.

Firstly, there are few family units that operate successfully as such for enough time to influence the moral and intellectual upbringing of the child.

Secondly, when you don’t know who your father is, it becomes impossible to avoid inbreeding, with brothers fathering children with half-sisters and first cousins. In the Muslim world, which allows intermarriage between first cousins, the result has been an ongoing downgrading of the Muslim gene pool. This is illustrated by statistics from England where a Muslim child is thirteen times as likely to suffer from mental retardation as his English neighbor.

This has been the way of life in Africa since Homo Erectus stalked the plains. Small villages and tribes encouraged interbreeding and a polygamous society exacerbated the problem. This in breeding has had disastrous consequences for the gene pool, both for Muslim nations as well as African ones. A quick look at the world map of average IQ distribution shows the damage done to population groups by self-destructive customs. http://www.targetmap.com/viewer.aspx?reportId=2812

Now, repairing the gene pool is a job for centuries of new habits to take effect, but a start must be made if Africa isn’t to continue to slowly slip ever further behind the rest of the world.

What can be fixed much more rapidly, is the family unit. A start must be made to force absent fathers to contribute to their children’s upbringing. It is not easy to change a culture, but the present system that allows men to get away with sowing their seed without having to care for it in its growing season, has to be discouraged. There are many ways of doing this: Taxing single men higher than married men. Compulsory paternity tests before welfare money is granted. Punitive punishments for men who don’t pay maintenance are some of the ways that can swing the way the family operates.

Only once these things are either fixed, or at least turned around, can the great benefits of education start to make a difference on a grand scale.

All will not be rosy, even if we fix the family unit. Very poorly educated fathers and mothers are not the best people to help children with their homework, and that will be what we have in SA.

This means that the crop of teachers currently being used to provide education will have to be greatly upgraded. At present, lecherous, lazy, absentee, unqualified people are responsible for preparing our children for the future. Teachers unions protect the status quo fiercely and government seems powerless, or worse, uninterested in forcing their educational workforce to do their jobs effectively.

This is perhaps the easiest part of the problem to turn around. Political will and reverting to the tried and trusted system of school inspectors can change the status quo very quickly. Widespread instant firing of delinquent teachers can have a salutary effect on the quality of teaching provided. The current crop of teachers is so poor in quality and morals, that widespread strikes will be a way for government to rid themselves of the dead wood painlessly. Of course, teachers training colleges will have to begin producing high grade teachers again, but this will not present a huge problem as can be seen by the extremely high budget allocation education already gets. This money just needs to be re-directed at providing quality rather than quantity.

Once we have fixed the family and the education department, we are presented with a quandary. What do we teach the children?

This needs some serious brainstorming and it needs to be done in partnership with industry. If South Africa is to become internationally competitive, how are we going to achieve this in the face of very stiff competition from countries with much higher human capital than ours. (see the IQ chart again)

Certainly, improving the family environment and the education system will make a huge difference to our future generations, but how do we become an international winning nation?

Do we need to become very light on our educational feet? Do we have to become much more responsive to the needs of industry so as to be able to tailor our curricula to the rapidly changing needs of the people who are going to employ our students? Is this where we can get an edge over our better-endowed competitors? This needs widespread and in-depth analysis among all stakeholders and can’t be glibly answered here.

What is clear is that the workplace has changed greatly from the days of relative prosperity during the Apartheid years. Employers have changed their emphasis.

In the pre-majority rule years, employers saw it as a necessity to provide as much employment as possible. This was not a altruistic thing, but it was thought to be wise so as to postpone the revolution which would otherwise engulf the country if widespread unemployment took hold.

Once majority rule ensued, the need to create otherwise uneconomic jobs disappeared. A newly confrontational workforce and the obsolete self-preserving social conscience made the switch to widespread automation the logical direction for industry to take. The South African worker became almost overnight a very difficult person to partner with. The demands for higher wages coupled to pitiful productivity forced any industrialist who wanted to survive to trim his workforce to the absolute minimum, replacing it with either uncomplaining robots or if that was impossible, outsourcing the work to either overseas labor or to domestic contractors who were better placed to discipline and control their workers.

All these changes have meant that today’s worker, emerging from the schooling system , needs to be much more productive and trained at a much more technical level than his absentee father was. His father was a skilled spot-welder on an automotive production line, using his muscle and manual dexterity to man-handle clumsy spot welding rigs around the carcass of a car. The new worker needs to be able to maintain and programme the robots that have replaced his father. A very different set of skills.

The present system has broken down and created bottle-necks at the tertiary educational stage.

By government abdicating responsibilities in the primary and secondary schooling phases, students meant to enter Technicons and universities are not of the standards required. Matric pass rates have been reduced and alternative easier courses have been devised by people lacking courage, to fool the student and his family into believing he is in fact capable to continue on in tertiary education.

Sadly, this is far from the truth, so there are hordes of prospective students creating bottlenecks that are further choked by affirmative enrolment, putting unsuitable students into a system that is incapable of both fixing what went wrong in the primary and secondary phases and providing a meaningful tertiary qualification.

This has resulted in further degradation of the system because students see their failure to complete courses a result of racism in the predominantly white academic staff. The easy cure for this is seen by students as appointing more black academics regardless of the quality, so that black students will get a more sympathetic ear.

This has the unintended consequence of destroying the integrity of the tertiary educational system. The real problems, low innate intelligence of the population, poor or no family units and sub-standard basic education are too daunting to confront, both politically and personally by the students or government involved.

For them, it is far too late to do anything. Twenty odd years of misdirected effort cannot be remedied in a few years, no matter how well structured the remedial action.

The hard truth is, for anything to change , even in the long term, radical social and governmental change is needed right now. This generation is to all intents and purposes lost and the country needs to do the best it can for them by asking foreign firms with labor intensive needs to come to the country, totally tax free if necessary, to provide employment to the millions whose futures have been wrecked by misguided and unworkable educational policies and a teaching body that couldn’t care less for their charges. This toxic mixture, poisoned by the lack of family values has made at least two generations unemployable and things need to change right now if we are not going to ruin another generation.