Last week’s state of the nation address (Sona) was a mess — right from the now-traditional EFF shenanigans to the “same-same but different” promises of the actual speech contents.
So I know many of you may have zoned out, despite your best intentions. But if you were listening with tech — or children — your ears may have pricked up when president Cyril Ramaphosa mentioned that coding and robotics were being incorporated into schooling.
“This year we will be introducing coding and robotics in grades R to 3 in 200 schools, with a plan to implement it fully by 2022,” he said.
Ramaphosa didn’t go into further detail, but this has been on the cards for a while. In fact, it even got a mention in the 2019 Sona, and basic education minister Angie Motshekga followed up with more details throughout the year. According to its website, the department of basic education (DBE) partnered with Standard Bank and a nonprofit organisation called Africa Teen Geeks — to convene “a team of experts in the field of computer applications technology and information technology” — in developing the curriculum. To support this, thousands of teachers have also been trained.
In her basic education budget speech last year, Motshekga included the alarming-to-some predictions, from the University of Oxford and Unesco, that something like 45% (according to Oxford) or 65% (Unesco) of jobs today will be nonexistent in the next decade or two. This, she said, was why it was so important to introduce digital subjects and “21st-century skills” — to be “responsive to the demands of the changing world”.
Then tourism minister Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane, speaking at the UN about sustainable development, said ... actually, long story short: just about everyone in the government is singing from the same fourth Industrial Revolution hymn sheet on the need to prep for a digital future.
That’s fantastic. We must be prepped. Man the, um, firewalls, and arm the robots! Or disarm them! I’m not sure; the digital apocalypse is coming and your children need to know how to weaponise code to stay safe.
Except they really don’t, at least not in the way it seems Motshekga et al are expecting. I am an advocate of coding, and have personally written on the “future of work” over the years. But digital literacy doesn’t mean reading and writing code like you would a language. It means being sufficiently exposed to and steeped in tech to operate in a world where it is ubiquitous, so you’re not left behind.
Writing on his own government’s plan for teaching children to code, Canadian education analyst Alex Usher summed up the problem in this thinking beautifully: “Coding is a valuable skill — for maybe 2% of the labour force. What the rest of us need is digital literacy and proficiency. Being able to write software is not the issue: rather, it is the ability to apply and use software productively that is the issue. Ten million people who understand how to input data into software correctly, 10-million who can use and analyse the data software provides us: that is something we should shoot for ... But 10-million coders? Mostly, that just pushes down wages in the tech sector.”
Whatever coding language these teachers and their young charges learn will be outdated before they make it to high school. We need to be incorporating digital into the other subjects, not corralling them out on their own. Isn’t that the message in “the ubiquity of tech”?
And yes, I concede the point that learning coding provides and strengthens other skills, beyond a specific language. The structure and method of coding can help nurture other in-demand proficiencies, including logical thinking and problem-solving. God willing, those aren’t likely to be defunct abilities by 2025.
Motshekga has been basic education minister since 2009 in a department that gets the lion’s share of the national budget. And still, something like 78% of our grade 4s are functionally illiterate, according to the last progress in international reading literacy study (Pirls). Our schools are overcrowded and their results dire. And that’s not even getting into the matters of decent school buildings with safe toilets, and students with full stomachs. We also have a booming market for private schools — read into that what you will.
It’s not that coding isn’t awesome. It really is. This is just “brick in the wall” thinking that seems to be adding another ball — nay, chainsaw — for an already tired and bruised education sector to juggle, and shoehorn into the school week. I hope I’m wrong.
• Thompson Ferreira is a freelance journalist, impactAFRICA fellow, and WanaData member.
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