Consciousness of our lived reality is a constant state of
mind that we find ourselves in from the very first day that we stop swimming
around in water and, according to a growing number of people, even before that.
The acquisition of knowledge is a task that begins primarily through this
medium of environmental exposure and therefore one could argue that experience
is not only the best teacher, but a key element that determines higher levels
of education in society.
I didn`t think that exposure to the outside world was that
big of an issue when it came to poor performing rural schools, until only a few
weeks ago when I presented a lesson to my Grade 10 class on a very simple Madam and Eve Cartoon about Global
Warming. In the cartoon, Thandi says to Mother Anderson ‘By using that aerosol
can, you could be affecting the life of a goat herder in Mongolia’. I was not
surprised when the class didn`t know where Mongolia was, so to help them along
I asked if they knew where China was. Again, my class of 64 learners
unanimously cried ‘No’. I was very taken aback.
If a learner doesn`t know where China is, how can we expect
them to understand The Greenhouse Effect and the role China plays in it. How
can anyone ever appreciate Animal Farm
if they don`t know where Russia, Italy and Germany are. What’s the point in
loving Mathematics when you don`t know where Greece and Arabia are and how these
nation contributed to the Science of Numbers. How do we expect to build a
nation filled with African pride if our kids don`t know where, once the world’s
first academic centre, Timbuktu, is.
An extensive knowledge of, not only how the world works, but
also seeing the practicality thereof, plays a major role in how a person grows
up in it and relates to it. Children who spend their daily lives trapped in
their immediate surroundings physically, unfortunately become trapped mentally
as well – Out of sight is out of mind. We need to allow our children to travel,
to see the world.
In addition to the therapeutic aspects that touring holds
for learners, I believe that it also provides a very subtle push in the right
direction towards excelling at school. It is as if saying to them ‘work a
little harder, so you can be rewarded at the end of it all’. It’s no secret
that the best performing schools (which are all, of course, private or,
previously referred to as, Model C) provide their learners with the most
extensive school trips during vacations, generally abroad.
Now I don`t think that a township school in the middle of
Hillbrow is going to afford to send it`s learners for a month to Switzerland,
but no doubt, they could raise enough to send them, at the least, to Durban or
Mpumalanga. It is imperative that High School learners become aware of the fact
that there is a wide world waiting to be explored and that reality continues to
thrive well beyond the Vaal dam.
I have since downloaded a World Map online, printed it out
(unfortunately the school can only print in black and white) and put it up in
the back of the class. It’s not much, but it does its job.
We live in a Global Village where the Six Degrees of Separation underlie the foundation of every relationship that we have with the world in which we live. A good education needs to be governed by a holistic awareness of the international landscape. Without an education system that strives to create citizens who understand their position in the world and how they have the power to change it, we are merely passing our existence on a chessboard with too many pawns. Lest we should end up where Matthew Arnold so vividly portrays in Dover Beach; ‘And we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms on struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night’.
