I gave my grade 10 high school physics/chemistry class a science project to work on in these June-July holidays.
Work out, in your own words, the physics of the Table Mountain cable car operation; or in science language, explain the principle of the cable car run.
They will bring their research with them later in July when the regular teacher and I take them up the famous mountain to test their ideas on site with an engineering expert.
This simple teaching and learning exercise should be unremarkable and yet it seldom happens in SA’s classrooms, if at all.
If you want to know why our children are bored out of their minds, it is because of soul-deadening experiences inside classrooms where they learn otherwise exciting subjects from a teacher droning on for hours a day with copious notes to be rewritten from the board or read from a textbook (for the lucky ones) and rehearsed in a test or exam. Over and over and over again.
It still boggles the mind that in a country rich in flora and fauna, full of museums and monuments, surrounded by mountains and oceans, we would strangle the joy out of learning by keeping them indoors for close to 200 school days a year.
How many tourism teachers put their classes on the Red Bus not simply to know their city but to anticipate what a career in this profession might look like?
For my physics class, the benefits of such a project are multiplied. They would learn science in the everyday world around them.
They would be researching how counterweights work in balancing the two cars and why there is a massive water tank under the rotating car to stabilise the carrier during high winds. Learning science, not from a textbook, but from real life.
All of them would go up “Africa’s leading tourist attraction in the world” (if you forgive the hyperbole of the Table Mountain website) for the very first time even though they live 35 minutes away on the Flats.
Unlike middle class kids, they might never experience this glorious human invention otherwise.
Ah, you might say, but it’s not in the exam; that’s the damn problem, that our curriculum authorities lack the imagination to make science real for all our children in all nine provinces.
Can you imagine being a history teacher in Gauteng and not taking your high school class to those two monuments to Afrikaner and African nationalisms (don’t worry, I know there is no moral equivalence between the two), the Voortrekker Monument and the Apartheid Museum?
Done on the same day, that experience would surely put the ideological cat among the nationalist pigeons for teachers and learners alike. Which is the point of a good education.
That Big Hole in Kimberley (no, not the provincial government) is a lesson in political economy staring at an enterprising teacher, even one possessed with a thin sense of history, extraction, economics and exploitation.
Yet I am sure those Northern Cape educators drive past “the world’s largest man-made open-pit diamond mine” with little thought to why there is water seepage in the ‘lake’ below or how this geographical area gave us a turning point in South African and world history that happened right there since the 1860s.
All of which raises the question: why do most teachers in SA not launch out to connect learning to life in everyday teaching?
Spoiler alert: it is not (primarily) the money.
There are three main reasons. One, it is the lack of imagination, the inability to see a world of learning beyond the classroom.
Two, incuriosity. Teachers are occupied with coverage and compliance, the only thing that matters when it comes to keeping the curriculum adviser (or whatever they’re called in different provinces) happy.
In other words, officials and teachers are complicit in the only game they know: pass rates in exams.
In the process, curiosity goes out the window and children come to believe that education is everything except asking original questions, thinking about complex subjects, figuring out how the cable car works.
Three, laziness. It takes a lot of work and some degree of risk when you go beyond the classroom.
Indemnity forms must be filled out. Buses or taxis must be hired. Food must be organised. Behaviour must be managed. Sites must be booked.
And yes, the event might happen over a weekend or holiday.
“But they will learn more, maybe even come to love the subject, and see opportunities beyond school,” says the angel on your one shoulder.
“But I am moeg, they pay me little enough, and that’s not my job,” says the devil on your other shoulder.
Most times, the devil wins hands down.
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