I have been reading with interest the comments made by Dr Mamphela Ramphele about our education system and the subsequent backlash from the SA Democratic Teachers Union.
While I understand the sensitivities involved, there is no disputing the statistics and certainly no justification to politicise this matter. Considering the consequences of what our education system is delivering, can we afford to worry about putting a few noses out of joint?
Talk about misplaced indignation! Good teachers are no doubt mortified by what is happening in education and there are a number of them.
Let’s face it, during apartheid young people of colour knew they were being short-changed on the education front. Now young people are matriculating full of hope and expectation, but the reality is that many of them are coming out functionally illiterate and essentially unemployable. How is this acceptable on any level?
A short time ago, I was chatting to a manufacturing manager who retired from one of the large automotive manufacturers about the challenges of implementing “lean” methodology in South Africa. He said one of our largest challenges was the education level of our people.
In Japan, the birthplace of lean, the population is so highly qualified that the line operators all have an engineering qualification of some description.
This makes adopting new methodology much easier, and when you have a workforce applying educated thinking to continuous improvement, better levels of productivity are achieved more easily. Having an educated workforce justifies the payment of higher wages too, because business is achieving productivity value for their money.
We must not lose sight of the fact that we are competing in this world environment. In SA, we seem to have lost our way as far as this is concerned.
When you consider it, the employment transaction is quite simple. It goes like this.
I need someone with “a” skills to do “x”, “y” and “z” to a particular level, for which I am willing to pay “r”, because it makes sense for me to manufacture my widgets at a profit.
When I pay the agreed amount and don’t achieve expected levels of productivity, then I don’t make money and I go out of business. If I pay more for the same output, and am unable to recover the difference in my selling price, the transaction doesn’t work either.
There is constant pressure from unions for business to pay higher wages, which is good and well. But we should be working to improve productivity to go along with those demands in order to balance the transaction in the long run because simply raising prices will make us uncompetitive in the current economic climate.
We will never rescue our people from poverty if we don’t educate them properly and we will never achieve the levels of productivity that ensure the kind of economic growth that will address our unemployment levels either.
We urgently need to sort out our education system and we need to challenge the prevailing attitude that high pay for less-than-adequate performance is acceptable, because this is a philosophy that pervades our society and, I am sorry to say, it is most evident in government departments. And, unfortunately, it is the government that sets the tone.
If we don’t address our challenges in education and balance the expectation and delivery transaction, it’s going to cost us very dearly in the long run.
