PCB Blog - Education
Education |
| 2011/03/25 |
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Melanie Veness: PCB CEO Something is very wrong. I am deeply concerned about what appears to be happening in our education system. A couple of months ago, I was asked to assist with the selection process for an internship programme. The candidates, all matriculants with tertiary qualifications, were asked to do a basic literacy and numeracy test, and I agreed to help mark the papers. To say that I was flabbergasted is an understatement. A number of these “qualified” youngsters were not able to match the number “16” with the word “sixteen”. My immediate thought was that perhaps language might be a barrier. But then I reached the numeracy section and discovered that a large percentage of the candidates (in the batch of about 100 papers that I marked) were unable to add two three-digit numbers or to perform basic multiplication tasks. I cast my mind back - matric maths was full of all sorts of complicated equations, geometry and trigonometry – there’s no way one could pass maths or maths literacy at this numeracy level. This begs the question: how then, did these young people get a matric certificate and a tertiary qualification? And what of the consequences? These poor youngsters must feel very frustrated, because they have a matric certificate and a “qualification”, and they are still essentially unemployable. Having shared this experience with several business people, I have discovered that employers are no longer just checking whether or not potential employees do in fact have the qualifications that they claim to have, but they are beginning, essentially, to question the integrity of qualifications. In fact, it has become more commonplace to test candidates’ abilities, before employing them – and wisely so, it appears. What does this mean for this group of young people? Their parents have probably struggled to pay their schools fees and their diploma fees, or they’ve had to borrow money to pay for their own studies, and they now have to find some way of repaying those loans. Have they been done any favours? How will they become economically active? When it gets down to brass tacks – these “qualifications” are just pieces of paper – and it is not good enough to produce them, you have to produce the goods too. We need to make sure that we are educating our children properly – that we are genuinely equipping them, because they can’t succeed without a proper education. Needless to say, the implications for business are deeply serious, and that in the context of government’s clarion call for the private sector to create more jobs. |
| Tags: Education(8) Learnership(1) Maths(1) Qualification(1) Employment(6) |
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