Now police have rioted outside parliament, attacking protesters in a style that could wake PW Botha from the dead, we have to understand why all this matters. And indeed, the government apparently does think it matters, hence the panicked offer to fund next year’s zero fee increase without thinking through how to pay for it.
So why should the rest of us care?
Students, after all, are in a position of relative privilege. Even those who struggle to make it through their degree and battle to fund themselves are better off than the rural poor who have nothing – no prospect of a job, ever.
Why this matters is that revolutionary change comes from frustrated hope, not from hopelessness. The French Revolution occurred not because France was the worst-off country in Europe but because it was one of the first to emerge from feudalism. It was frustration at the pace of change that caused the revolution. A feudal society on the other hand is very stable. The peasants are stuck in a state of hopelessness. The aristocracy are far too strong to challenge and what little the peasants have can easily be taken away, leaving them to starve.
South Africa today is the most unequal society on the planet. The rural poor and the urban unemployed have very little hope of things getting better. The ANC, like feudal aristocrats, hands down just enough largesse by way of social grants and free but inadequate schooling to prevent total hopelessness. The section of the population that has most reason to be upset about the broken promise of “a better life for all” continues to vote ANC loyally. In the same way, feudal peasants would have willingly given their life for their lord, despite the manifest unfairness of a tiny minority growing wealthy without offering a glimmer of hope to those left out. Why? Because in a state of hopelessness, the hand that gives out inadequate mercies is all you have.
Students are in a different position. They do have hope. Once they graduate, a range of better jobs becomes open to them. But that hope is frustrated because of the high cost of higher education, inadequate financial aid for the poor and a sluggish economy that doesn’t guarantee work even for those who do qualify. An unemployed graduate who has no debt is a potential entrepreneur. Ask Mark Shuttleworth. The NSFAS scheme is not a great substitute for full funding – even if it were adequately funded – because it limits the option of entrepreneurship for unemployed graduates.
Are demands like no fees or no increase ridiculous? No, in the light of the benefit to society. But universities have to cover their costs. Government has created the problem by encouraging universities to increase numbers without covering the costs adequately. Something has to change.
Ideally, government should fund students fully so there is no class or wealth difference at universities. To do so would cost about 10% of tax revenues. You could argue that is a good investment because students who are successful will add significantly to the tax base. However, this ANC government is not about working for the common good, but is about lining the pockets of its cronies, so that is not going to happen. The best we can really hope for is full funding for those who really can’t afford fees.
What student protest can do is to wake up the rest of the excluded population to the fact that this government is not interested in anything but themselves. The big worry is that this turns into another Arab Spring movement that forces change but has no clear agenda of what that change should be. In Egypt, a military dictator was ousted, followed by an elected government that had protestors back out in the street. Next thing Egypt had yet another military dictator. Forcing change is not enough: we need to know what we are demanding. For this reason, we need to start talking seriously about what is really wrong in our society – what the deep entrenched causes of inequality are and how to address them.
Tuesday, 27 October 2015
United: Fly the F-U Skies
I am in the US as part of a sabbatical, for about a month. My wife accompanied me as far as Washington Dulles Airport, then we split – I am in Michigan, she went for a couple of weeks to Peru. South African Airways failed to load our suitcases in Johannesburg, which we only discovered after parting at Washington.
In the US, United Airlines handles SAA’s baggage and that’s where the problem really began.
In South Africa, we are used to whingeing about poor service. In the US, you expect better. Everyone is trained up in being nice and putting the customer first – or at least it seems so. United at first seemed fine – when I arrived in Detroit, they gave me a file reference number and told me when to expect my suitcase to arrive. Much as I expected, it was rerouted to the same flights a day later.
My wife’s situation was a little different. At Washington, her original ticket ended and she switched to an American Airlines flight. To complicate things, she arrived in the midst of a big strike that affected airports. But that cleared in a day or two. What I think really broke things is that United decided to keep things in house and used one of their own flights from Washington to Peru, and the routing I had from them was via Houston and Lima. No doubt that saved them money – they would be charging SAA for handling this for them and they would do better if they didn’t have to pay another airline to take the luggage.
For the last few days leading up to the fifth day, at the end of which the airline would have to pay compensation, United kept stringing me along. Then it turns out they have no record of her suitcase past Lima and – wait for it – don’t want to hear about a compensation claim. The suitcase now has an SAA file reference number on a different tracking system.
Up to that point United had been very happy to handle this – they could perform a service for SAA and profit from the fee. Her suitcase made it as far as Lima on a United flight and now has gone missing. It had one more stop after that: Cusco. Suddenly at the exact point when they (since it is their fault; SAA did not lose the suitcase in Lima) would have to pay compensation, they give me an SAA file reference number and tell me to F off (not quite in those words but their meaning is clear).
If SAA pays compensation, good. I will give them that option (they are so far being cooperative – so I will give them benefit of the doubt). If not, we have the mess of trying to claim from insurance for something that should not be an insurable loss. I will somehow have to get a letter from at least one of the airlines explaining why they are not paying for the loss.
Are they just being horrible to me? No – United has a poor track record on service that the new CEO ought to be prioritizing.
Not too soon as far as I am concerned. I had a flight from hell with United in the 1980s. I had just arrived from South Africa into New York and boarded a flight to Chicago en route to Minneapolis. After we boarded and the doors were closed, we were told there was a delay for bad weather and sat next to the terminal for 3 hours. Once we reached Chicago all outgoing flights had left and instead of putting us up for the night (it was their choice to leave us stranded at around midnight), we were offered a list of discounted hotel rooms. The discounted rooms had all sold out, and I ended up trying to sleep in the airport, not with much success.
This is the first time in 30 years that I’ve flown United, and I didn’t allow enough time for them to improve.
So United, your “Fly the friendly skies” slogan is a tad misleading. I suggest “Fly the F-U skies”. Whether you take that as your attitude to service or my attitude to you is your choice. Both fit.
What really beggars the imagination is that a total stranger with the details of the suitcase could walk up to the United baggage desk in Lima and be told where the suitcase was yet United’s internal systems could not track it down. Part of the problem is they don’t answer their phones; I was put on hold 3 times by the United central baggage tracing service and not once were they able to reach their own baggage desk in Lima. I tried calling the SAA baggage desk at Dulles and not only didn’t get a reply but messages left were not returned. Since United handles SAA baggage in the US I would not be surprised if it was in fact United staff who were not taking calls.
In the US, United Airlines handles SAA’s baggage and that’s where the problem really began.
In South Africa, we are used to whingeing about poor service. In the US, you expect better. Everyone is trained up in being nice and putting the customer first – or at least it seems so. United at first seemed fine – when I arrived in Detroit, they gave me a file reference number and told me when to expect my suitcase to arrive. Much as I expected, it was rerouted to the same flights a day later.
My wife’s situation was a little different. At Washington, her original ticket ended and she switched to an American Airlines flight. To complicate things, she arrived in the midst of a big strike that affected airports. But that cleared in a day or two. What I think really broke things is that United decided to keep things in house and used one of their own flights from Washington to Peru, and the routing I had from them was via Houston and Lima. No doubt that saved them money – they would be charging SAA for handling this for them and they would do better if they didn’t have to pay another airline to take the luggage.
For the last few days leading up to the fifth day, at the end of which the airline would have to pay compensation, United kept stringing me along. Then it turns out they have no record of her suitcase past Lima and – wait for it – don’t want to hear about a compensation claim. The suitcase now has an SAA file reference number on a different tracking system.
Up to that point United had been very happy to handle this – they could perform a service for SAA and profit from the fee. Her suitcase made it as far as Lima on a United flight and now has gone missing. It had one more stop after that: Cusco. Suddenly at the exact point when they (since it is their fault; SAA did not lose the suitcase in Lima) would have to pay compensation, they give me an SAA file reference number and tell me to F off (not quite in those words but their meaning is clear).
If SAA pays compensation, good. I will give them that option (they are so far being cooperative – so I will give them benefit of the doubt). If not, we have the mess of trying to claim from insurance for something that should not be an insurable loss. I will somehow have to get a letter from at least one of the airlines explaining why they are not paying for the loss.
Are they just being horrible to me? No – United has a poor track record on service that the new CEO ought to be prioritizing.
Not too soon as far as I am concerned. I had a flight from hell with United in the 1980s. I had just arrived from South Africa into New York and boarded a flight to Chicago en route to Minneapolis. After we boarded and the doors were closed, we were told there was a delay for bad weather and sat next to the terminal for 3 hours. Once we reached Chicago all outgoing flights had left and instead of putting us up for the night (it was their choice to leave us stranded at around midnight), we were offered a list of discounted hotel rooms. The discounted rooms had all sold out, and I ended up trying to sleep in the airport, not with much success.
This is the first time in 30 years that I’ve flown United, and I didn’t allow enough time for them to improve.
So United, your “Fly the friendly skies” slogan is a tad misleading. I suggest “Fly the F-U skies”. Whether you take that as your attitude to service or my attitude to you is your choice. Both fit.
Update
My wife finally found her suitcase. Someone staying at the same place was returning via the same route and asked after it at the United baggage desk in Lima. They said it had gone to Cusco. My wife had to go to the Cusco airport to drop someone off (not really but shared the taxi) and picked it up. United meanwhile offered to send me a $75 Travel Certificate (which needless to say hasn’t show up yet). How this compensates to 9 days of borrowed clothing and wasting time I don’t know. I certainly can’t use it because I am not resident of the US or anywhere else United operates, and would be embarrassed to give it to someone else after this.What really beggars the imagination is that a total stranger with the details of the suitcase could walk up to the United baggage desk in Lima and be told where the suitcase was yet United’s internal systems could not track it down. Part of the problem is they don’t answer their phones; I was put on hold 3 times by the United central baggage tracing service and not once were they able to reach their own baggage desk in Lima. I tried calling the SAA baggage desk at Dulles and not only didn’t get a reply but messages left were not returned. Since United handles SAA baggage in the US I would not be surprised if it was in fact United staff who were not taking calls.
Sunday, 30 August 2015
Education Crisis: An Alternative
Several universities around South Africa are in the throes of protests about lack of transformation – UCT, Stellenbosch, Rhodes, to name a few.
While these are important debates, the biggest single cause for concern about education in South Africa is the very slow progress in making university accessible at all. The university-qualifying matric exam has a hugely skewed results distribution. About 10% of schools are fee-paying, including government schools that charge a fee and private schools. These schools mostly achieve acceptable results, with anyone with academic potential studying there almost certain to get a university-entry pass. Of the remaining 90%, one in nine achieves acceptable results; the remaining 80% of schools have poor pass rates and produce few university-ready students.
Even learning a trade that requires significant intellectual skills, such as becoming an electrician, is problematic with poor school results.
Get this right, and we will no longer have to wonder how black economic empowerment breaks out of a narrow definition of a small group who enrich themselves while the majority stay poor.
While it is true that fee-free schools have massive resource constraints (class sizes around 50, compared with half that number of less at fee-paying schools; under-qualified teachers, no budget for maintenance, inadequate or non-existent libraries and labs, etc.), that is not the only problem. If one in nine of these schools can do well, the rest could too. The problem is political, not technical – the government is not willing to take realistic steps to solve the problem.
In the past there have been tutoring schemes run by outsiders such as universities, but these have limited value. The real deep issue is that school kids in dysfunctional schools are being told day in and day out not to have high expectations. Many of the townships where they live look like trash heaps. Teachers discourage initiative, and employment opportunities for those who exit school are very limited.
An important part of education theory is self efficacy, your belief in your own ability to complete a task. If everything in your life tells you that all you can expect is failure, that is a major dampener on self efficacy. Self efficacy is important because a major component of learning is pushing through hard problems and learning from mistakes. If you have no self-belief, you give up when things get hard, and take mistakes as failure.
Add to this that many families in poorer communities have no history of education, and the very concept of education is mystified.
Outside interventions are ineffective if they serve to heighten the sense of lack of self-worth and perpetuate the mystification of education. Education is something handed down by the “other”, rather than something to be internalized and built on.
How can we change this?
I propose then that those who have the interest and motivation to run tutoring schemes change the approach. Instead of going to depressed communities to tutor, they should train members of the target classes in tutoring the week’s material then send them back to the community to run tutoring sessions in small groups. This approach has a number of benefits:
Should it work? Look at the first picture, the traditional education model, in a large class. The teacher is apart from the class, handing information down from a height. It would take a very brave teacher in this scenario to encourage critical thinking in the class. Add to this the problem that many teachers are not well qualified in their subject and that schools in many cases are poorly led, and the surprise is not that most fail but rather that most succeed.
Now, let us look at the traditional style of intervention, the tutoring scheme. We have learners in smaller groups, imparting subject knowledge in smaller groups. That is an improvement as some interaction is theoretically possible. However for a class with no experience of interacting with teachers, there is a cultural barrier that is hard to break, and the reliance on outsiders does not demystify education. Schemes like this usually work to the extent that while the intervention exists, results improve – but the improvement is often not sustained when the intervention ends.
My proposed scheme requires two pictures. The first picture illustrates tutor training. Now the groups are much smaller, and it is easier to provoke interaction. The tutors are learning to tutor, so they have to learn to engage with the material. Because they are in a much smaller group when they work with the subject specialists, barriers can be broken down. This culture change is essential for their later success, and a critical part of the success of peer tutoring is that fact that they can go back to their community as non-outsiders and break the barrier to interaction within their own peer group.
The final picture illustrates the second half of my scheme – the tutors are back in their community, with enough of them to work in small groups. The interactiveness they have learnt in their tutor training should be possible to continue in this setting, since their classmates should not have any barrier to talking.
Will all this work?
What we have been doing so far has not worked. So it is worth trying. Education theory supports the idea; like any idea the test is in the results. It is doable and since all else has failed or produced limited results, it is worth trying something new.
While these are important debates, the biggest single cause for concern about education in South Africa is the very slow progress in making university accessible at all. The university-qualifying matric exam has a hugely skewed results distribution. About 10% of schools are fee-paying, including government schools that charge a fee and private schools. These schools mostly achieve acceptable results, with anyone with academic potential studying there almost certain to get a university-entry pass. Of the remaining 90%, one in nine achieves acceptable results; the remaining 80% of schools have poor pass rates and produce few university-ready students.
Even learning a trade that requires significant intellectual skills, such as becoming an electrician, is problematic with poor school results.
Inequality
It is the lack of access to tertiary education and training that is not only causing South Africa to become one of the most unequal societies on Earth, but also inhibits economic development. A few years back it was reported that there was a shortage of over 800,000 skilled people in the job market. Programs like rapid roll-out of renewable energy are likely to be hampered by this skills shortage.Get this right, and we will no longer have to wonder how black economic empowerment breaks out of a narrow definition of a small group who enrich themselves while the majority stay poor.
While it is true that fee-free schools have massive resource constraints (class sizes around 50, compared with half that number of less at fee-paying schools; under-qualified teachers, no budget for maintenance, inadequate or non-existent libraries and labs, etc.), that is not the only problem. If one in nine of these schools can do well, the rest could too. The problem is political, not technical – the government is not willing to take realistic steps to solve the problem.
A starting point
So what can the rest of us do?In the past there have been tutoring schemes run by outsiders such as universities, but these have limited value. The real deep issue is that school kids in dysfunctional schools are being told day in and day out not to have high expectations. Many of the townships where they live look like trash heaps. Teachers discourage initiative, and employment opportunities for those who exit school are very limited.
An important part of education theory is self efficacy, your belief in your own ability to complete a task. If everything in your life tells you that all you can expect is failure, that is a major dampener on self efficacy. Self efficacy is important because a major component of learning is pushing through hard problems and learning from mistakes. If you have no self-belief, you give up when things get hard, and take mistakes as failure.
Add to this that many families in poorer communities have no history of education, and the very concept of education is mystified.
Outside interventions are ineffective if they serve to heighten the sense of lack of self-worth and perpetuate the mystification of education. Education is something handed down by the “other”, rather than something to be internalized and built on.
How can we change this?
A new approach
One approach in education that has been very effective if done right is peer tutoring. Tutors from the same class as the student demystify education because they show the learners that someone from their own group can master the material. The tutors also gain a benefit because teaching others is a great way to learn.I propose then that those who have the interest and motivation to run tutoring schemes change the approach. Instead of going to depressed communities to tutor, they should train members of the target classes in tutoring the week’s material then send them back to the community to run tutoring sessions in small groups. This approach has a number of benefits:
- demystifying education – if tutoring is mastered by members of your own class, education is no longer something that can only occur if strangers are present handing it down
- building leaders – the tutors self-efficacy is further enhanced by their tutoring role, which naturally puts them in a leadership role
- scalability – community members with subject knowledge can train up tutors who then take their knowledge to the class, which means far fewer subject experts are needed
Some detail
 |
| Teaching to a large class |
 |
| Outsiders tutoring |
 |
| Outsiders training tutors |
 |
| Peer tutoring – tutors from the class being tutored |
Will all this work?
What we have been doing so far has not worked. So it is worth trying. Education theory supports the idea; like any idea the test is in the results. It is doable and since all else has failed or produced limited results, it is worth trying something new.
Tuesday, 25 August 2015
Call me prejudiced
Call me prejudiced: I hate bigots.
Stellenbosch University is the subject of a 35-minute video titled “Luister” disclosing racial problems around town and issues with coping with Afrikaans as a teaching language.
I don’t have enough context to know how big the problem really is, so let’s look at why black students should want to go to an Afrikaans university, given that English is a much more useful language in terms of tapping into international expertise. If you look at options available to students, 2 out of the 5 top-tier universities – University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Pretoria, Rhodes University and Stellenbosch University – are Afrikaans-language universities. Allowing that Rhodes is pretty small and Pretoria is pretty large, that means about half the places in the country’s top universities are at historically Afrikaans institutions.
Black students of course could choose to go exclusively to the English-language universities, but do the Afrikaans universities want that? Officially not, of course, and their numbers depend on being open to all races because that’s the reality of the society we live in now. Even if they completely privatised, they would still be under pressure to deracialize.
So what are the difficulties?
Most students who have not grown up with Afrikaans do high school in English. This means that lessons in Afrikaans – even if only some of the materials handed out are in Afrikaans – can be a challenge. That can be addressed by a sympathetic environment, by making it socially conducive for black students to mix with native Afrikaans speakers, by encouraging students to help each other with translation in informal study groups and so on.
The problem really starts on the social side. If students are not made to feel welcome and not offered the opportunity for an immersive Afrikaans experience, that heightens the language difficulty.
How bad a problem is it really? As I say I don’t know any more than is in the video, which may leave out a lot of context. What I do know is that the discussion over at YouTube shows there are plenty of people out there with strongly pro-apartheid sentiments. One Johannes S for example spouts all the racist arguments about inherent intellectual inferiority the darker the skin, how segregation is natural and everything else is leftist social engineering, and so on.
Those posting racist comments fail to spot the obvious irony that their commentary validates the point of those demanding transformation.
That takes me to the real deep problem. It is not just about transforming the odd university. It is about transforming our society as a whole. Is the rainbow nation a myth? I think not – there is a lot of good will on all sides. But there is this unpleasant sore that won’t go away. And I do not think it is up to the government to heal it. There is just so much legislation can do, and politicians are not on the whole all that competent.
So let us listen to those from communities that differ from ourselves, understand where they are coming from and engage in a respectful way. Only by making the Johannes S style of discourse so socially unacceptable that it crawls back under the rock from which it emerged will we make the rainbow nation a reality. And that is just the start – we also need to address the practical problems that make South Africa such an unequal society.
I don’t have enough context to know how big the problem really is, so let’s look at why black students should want to go to an Afrikaans university, given that English is a much more useful language in terms of tapping into international expertise. If you look at options available to students, 2 out of the 5 top-tier universities – University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Pretoria, Rhodes University and Stellenbosch University – are Afrikaans-language universities. Allowing that Rhodes is pretty small and Pretoria is pretty large, that means about half the places in the country’s top universities are at historically Afrikaans institutions.
Black students of course could choose to go exclusively to the English-language universities, but do the Afrikaans universities want that? Officially not, of course, and their numbers depend on being open to all races because that’s the reality of the society we live in now. Even if they completely privatised, they would still be under pressure to deracialize.
So what are the difficulties?
Most students who have not grown up with Afrikaans do high school in English. This means that lessons in Afrikaans – even if only some of the materials handed out are in Afrikaans – can be a challenge. That can be addressed by a sympathetic environment, by making it socially conducive for black students to mix with native Afrikaans speakers, by encouraging students to help each other with translation in informal study groups and so on.
The problem really starts on the social side. If students are not made to feel welcome and not offered the opportunity for an immersive Afrikaans experience, that heightens the language difficulty.
How bad a problem is it really? As I say I don’t know any more than is in the video, which may leave out a lot of context. What I do know is that the discussion over at YouTube shows there are plenty of people out there with strongly pro-apartheid sentiments. One Johannes S for example spouts all the racist arguments about inherent intellectual inferiority the darker the skin, how segregation is natural and everything else is leftist social engineering, and so on.
Those posting racist comments fail to spot the obvious irony that their commentary validates the point of those demanding transformation.
That takes me to the real deep problem. It is not just about transforming the odd university. It is about transforming our society as a whole. Is the rainbow nation a myth? I think not – there is a lot of good will on all sides. But there is this unpleasant sore that won’t go away. And I do not think it is up to the government to heal it. There is just so much legislation can do, and politicians are not on the whole all that competent.
So let us listen to those from communities that differ from ourselves, understand where they are coming from and engage in a respectful way. Only by making the Johannes S style of discourse so socially unacceptable that it crawls back under the rock from which it emerged will we make the rainbow nation a reality. And that is just the start – we also need to address the practical problems that make South Africa such an unequal society.
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