The South African government has just tabled a bill that will make home schooling your children much more difficult – and much, much more expensive.
For a start home-schooled scholars will become subject to annual state education assessments from state educators (which parents will have to pay extra for, of course). What is more, several of the most widely-used international home-schooling syllabuses will become “illegal”. In fact, the bill indicates that home schooling parents will be compelled to teach their children only the South African state syllabus – or face up to six years of jail time and see their children removed to foster homes – totalitarian much?
Like the South African state educational syllabus is doing so well – what with the amazing 44.8% real Matric pass rate and 36.6% youth unemployment rate it is producing right now. I can’t imagine why any parent would ever want to deviate from this proven path to future success.
The question is, why are governments so afraid of home schooling? They should be delighted – every home-schooled child is one less child the government (and the tax payer) has to support.
What are they so afraid of home-schooled children learning? Actual real world skills, taught by someone who loves them, rather than some unionised in-it-for-the-money public school teacher?
With the exponential pace of changing going on in our world, no slow-moving state education syllabus is ever going to prepare children to succeed in the future world of work. In the future (as in tomorrow) technological ability, entrepreneurship and critical thinking skills will be far more important than whatever parrot-learned, historically biased information the government thinks children should and should not know. South African state schools do not teach coding at primary school level, as is becoming common in Europe. South African state schools do not even teach maths properly (unless a 20% “pass mark” “pass mark” is your idea of teaching Maths “properly”. World class that. World class.).
South Africa needs to wake up or get left behind, again.
My take is that the government wants to equalise education down to the lowest common denominator – the low, low standard of state education.
At least that will be “fair” right?