A few years ago, BizNews challenged its readers to submit stories about their dream for South Africa. There was one resident from Mossel Bay who responded with his dream of fixing South Africa’s education system. He is Pieter Steenekamp who soon realised that you can’t fix tertiary education without doing something about primary and secondary education, so he shifted his focus to that and opened a school for all ages in Mossel Bay, the Novel Academy. It is based on the principles of self-teaching of Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra known for his TED talks, on the Granny Cloud. Steenkamp told BizNews that his Novel Academy does not have any teachers. – Linda van Tilburg
Different age groups in the same class
What we do is not primary or secondary. It’s a school that we mix in different ages and we really want to start typically at age four. But at the moment, I’m not ready to take the small kids. So, at the moment, a requirement is that they must read and write, and do basic arithmetic, but we want to expand teaching to take in the kids from age four and to when they write their equivalent of the matric because we follow the Cambridge system. The Cambridge system is not South African matric, but it’s accepted by the South African universities. The Cambridge system is arguably the best school system in the world. So, it is accepted in South Africa, but all over the world…
The mainstream school system in the world is not fit-for-purpose
It focusses on children passing exams and passing tests and doing IQ level performance in terms of formal curriculum and maths and so on. And I don’t think that is a good preparation for the world. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. There are many other things that you need to do to prepare yourself for the world. Today, when you finish school; it’s tough out there and knowledge is changing all the time. So, if you have passed exam, in very few years after that, that knowledge is going to be obsolete in any case. In the past when I was young, it was easy if you finish school, you’ll get a job and you progress in your job, but today it’s totally different. You’ve got to be prepared to take on challenges. Nobody’s going to tell you what to do. And our school system is still based on teaching the children, ‘Now you go to Chapter 8 and you do this work and prepare yourself for the exams.’
Self-education is the key… with a lot of help from the Internet
What we try to do, is to let them own their own education. We help them. We assist them. But it’s really up to them to do the work. And also, what is different from now, from compared to when I was young is, there’s so much very, very good stuff out there on the internet, completely free. So, previously you had to add the teacher and the teacher presented the material. Teachers had the knowledge and they passed on their knowledge, but that’s not required anymore. So, you can have very good education provided the kids are motivated to look for it, provided they can do it.
And in addition to that, in South Africa, the education system is broken too. There are good schools compared to the mainstream criteria, but in the townships and rural areas, really very little proper education is taking place there.
Teachers not needed here but self-discipline is
I thought that with the fact that the resources are available, you don’t need good teachers. You need to manage and environment, then it’s possible to have very good education that doesn’t cost a lot of money. So, if you manage your environment; you manage your emotions properly; you can get them [the pupils] to look for the information and that also were mixing comes in the group with the nine children I have at the moment with the nine children. There is a little girl of 9 and a number of children in-between with the oldest girl who is 17 and the older children help the younger children. That’s also why you don’t need the expensive teacher. Our model is not yet working properly. One of the reasons why the previous model failed, is you need to get the children to be disciplined and if you just take people from the street, they are not disciplined. At the moment what hat we do, is enforce discipline, very soft self-discipline and we sort of guide them to help themselves with the idea that if they are working well, we’re going to relax with taking away less enforced discipline and getting them to use their self-discipline, and hopefully to work from there.
The idea for the Novel Academy comes from Indian grannies
There is a guy in India called Sugata Mitra, I have read a lot of what he has done and he proved that you could really leave kids alone. He calls it the grandmother model. It’s typically grandmothers without any education experience, without any teaching experience who are just looking after the emotional needs of children. It is not really the motivational need, but their supports. It’s sort of looking over their shoulder and asking them, ‘Show me what you are doing.’ Then they enthusiastically tell their grandmother to respond with, ‘I don’t understand anything but it looks great. Carry on. Like that. It is amazing the volunteers you get. I went to Mossel Bay, to Facebook groups and asked for volunteers and there are many, many people willing to do volunteer work on a no-cost basis. So, we want to prove that a low-coast school in Mossel Bay and if that works, we want to roll it out to the townships and rural areas.
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