In Tsakane, the township where I grew up, over 50 per cent of the children were girls. By the time I was in high school, a large group of girls were clustered either a year or two behind/above my grade level. I saw the older girls work extremely hard. Our families put a great emphasis on education and many girls would drop extracurricular activities by the final year to focus for the exam that would determine the rest of their lives. The normal school day was about six hours. By the time of the exam the girls would extend that to over eight to 12 hours, and yet of the 20 girls I knew who took that exam before me, none passed. After all their hard work in high school they ended up having to ask my mum help them find work as domestic workers or tellers.
Upon completion of my primary schooling, both my parents insisted that I go to the top school in the Tsakane, Buhlebemfundo. The school was known for its good exam results and “discipline” – it was a 10 to 12 kilometre daily walk for or me. It was there that I got selected for a handful of supplementary programs that enabled me to start teaching my math and science classes as early as a 10th grade. I graduated top of my class at the end of 2006 and was admitted to the University of the Witwatersrand for my first Bachelors degree.
From the first few weeks it was clear that I wasn’t as “advanced” as I had been convinced. I lacked both the language and cognitive skills (amongst others) that were required to engage with the education. There was a clear deficit between my peers and me. I began to understand the absence of people from similar backgrounds in my class, we were ill-prepared. Despite our absence, we still account for the majority of the population. I remember going to my former headmaster at the end of the first university quarter and asking him to allow me to help prepare the seniors for “the horror that was about to come” after high school.
For three years I ran a supplementary math, science and language programme during June to July, and September vacations, across three of the largest schools in the area. I raised funds through donations and convinced some of my university friends to also give their time. By the end of the second year I became disillusioned, realising the limited impact I had and that traditional approaches were clearly not the solution. By the end of 2009, the programme halted and I was actively looking for something that could address what I saw as an inexplicable injustice: the social status of parents determining the abilities of a child, reinforcing the current social inequalities in one of the most unequal countries in the world.
The solution clearly required innovative thinking and effective utilisation of very limited resources. We came up with a system in which we could foster inquiry-based learning that would celebrate the strong characters of children in our targets communities – whilst accelerating both cognitive and leadership development.
What initially started as a microfinance idea, soon became a system in which we could create opportunities for the talented, yet “unskilled”, young adults to enable us to effectively utilise our teachers. Our programme is a rotational model in which children do specific activities that facilitate their cognitive and character development. African School for Excellence is a non-profit organisation aiming to revolutionise South African education by addressing the two concerns in education: cost and quality. How? By enrolling a model for high-school education that provides a world-class, affordable, financially-sustainable and scalable education in the township.
The inaugural campus launched in 2013 and sourced scholars exclusively from local government schools. Today 278 scholars are enrolled in grades seven to nine. The cost per learner is roughly 40 per cent less than government schools, and up to 90 per cent less than top-achieving independent schools – all done through efforts of locally based staff. In 2014, the grade eight scholars wrote the grade nine Annual National Assessment. More than nine out of 10 performed in the top 10 per cent of the country in mathematics.
Written by Nonhlanhla Masina, co-founder of the African School for Excellence (ASE). ASE was inducted as an Ashoka
No comments:
Post a Comment