Between the 1859 and 1952 era in education, John Dewey the pragmatist educationist argued and criticised the education curriculum system that was traditional and included meaningless and needless content. He further heavily criticized the traditional curriculum that did not give “utility education” – utility education means that the education system is useful and can be applied in real life situations and moreover, relevant enough in the world we live in. The last aspect Dewey argued is a rigid curriculum – rigid curriculum refers to the curriculum that fails to cater for individualistic traits of each and every learner (all learners, different as they are, learn the same thing, at a same pace, and taught by the same teacher).
Dewey criticism of the then curriculum system was revolutionary as it challenged education authorities to consider the observations of Dewey. However, it is heart-breaking that today, in the 21st century, curriculum system in South Africa is still traditional and teach meaningless and needless content to learners. Learners in schools are still taught theoretical information they will never use. The curriculum system fails to identify diverse career interests learners bring on the education table and deliver content in accordance with diverse future interests of learners – meaningless and needless and utterly directionless.
There’s no importance in knowing the animal body parts and be able to identify them if you are not even interested in animal husbandry, veterinarian etc. An aspiring Accountant, Lawyer, Journalist, Sport coach, Artist etc. in High school is likely to feel excluded during such a lesson in class. This lesson, to such a group of learners, is meaningless and needless and ultimately irrelevant. The worst discovery to know is that this happens every day in the south African public school classrooms.
The curriculum in South Africa is still failing to offer utility education. As explained earlier, utility education seeks relevancy – education that is based on life experiences. This is the education where learners are taught about societal current affairs that sometimes personally relate or resonates with learners’ experiences. A conclusive proof that the current curriculum completely overlooks utility education component is the fact that a lot would be happening in the political space, yet learners go to school and still identify animal body parts and cram literature and poetry set work from their language Educators. Issues of feminism, politics, race, illicit financial flows by leaders of the world etc. are totally overlooked and deliberately ignored. In short, in the process of undermining utility education a lot of meaningful education and potential capacitation is missed and consequently, no education has taken place at all.
Utility education is also about learning for skill. If education is not providing a particular skill, it then becomes redundant because all that is needed is the memorization of facts without any performance. Performance based education is always better than memorization based education – the market is looking for performers not facts memorisers. That is why learners are bored in classrooms because they are locked in together and forced to memorize particular facts to remember in the examination at the year-end – https://simnandisolutions.co.za/2020/06/20/the- reasons-school-bores-learners/
The curriculum in South Africa is also rigid – individualism is completely undermined and not catered for. A rigid curriculum, from the pragmatic point of view, is under the impression that all learners of the same age will be grouped together, taught the same thing, and taught by the same teacher to
memorize facts. This process prevents creativity and uniqueness; all what leaners have to engage on is what is taught for memorization purposes, anything outside that is highly prohibited.
The rigidness of the curriculum is also evident when learners of different characters and different future aspirations are grouped together to do the same thing without catering for differences. A law student can’t be in the same class with an engineer student, so as the hospitality inclined learners can’t be in the same class with performing art students. This also relates to effective curriculum differentiation implementation – In order to create education harmony and relevancy, group learners in accordance with their future career aspirations and let them excel. As one has said before “You can’t treat all patients, affected by different sicknesses, with the same medication, you will lose some in the process of your treatment” and that is exactly what has been happening with South African education curriculum system. A lot of talented and capable individuals ended up on the streets after the system has declared them failures just because they failed within a system that was designed for a different kind of individuals but applied to everybody in a similar way. The failures of learners within the NCS depicts the failures of the curriculum system itself. South African education curriculum system is guilty of education crimes it has committed.
Simnandi solutions Pty Ltd have developed an alternative curriculum that is designed in accordance with getting rid of rigidness, ensuring utility education and promoting education that is meaningful, useful and relevant for all learners. That is why we have developed a Personalized Education Curriculum System (PECS). PECS is an advocate for explicit education curriculum system that is about the reality of the world people find themselves in. PECS seeks to reverse the current curriculum irrelevancy into curriculum relevancy. The PECS is designed to save learners from the monstrous curriculum that forces them to undertake subjects they won’t need in the future. PECS is a transformative education curriculum system that, through its nature of design, will put an end to the whole confusion around curriculum debates. PECS seeks to bring back the value and the dignity of our education system. PECS ensures that learners taste the glimpse of the workplace experience while still at school. That’s what makes our curriculum unique and highly relevant to inspire the education community of our nation, South Africa and the whole of Africa. And that is how we believe the education system can be fixed.
Know more about PECS: https://simnandisolutions.co.za/personalized-education/
Click on PECS PowerPoint presentation.
Please answer these 3 questions and submit: https://simnandisolutions.co.za/pecs-questionnaires/