Education Crisis: An Alternative

Several universities around South Africa are in the throes of protests about lack of transformation – UCT, Stellenbosch, Rhodes, to name a few.

While these are important debates, the biggest single cause for concern about education in South Africa is the very slow progress in making university accessible at all. The university-qualifying matric exam has a hugely skewed results distribution. About 10% of schools are fee-paying, including government schools that charge a fee and private schools. These schools mostly achieve acceptable results, with anyone with academic potential studying there almost certain to get a university-entry pass. Of the remaining 90%, one in nine achieves acceptable results; the remaining 80% of schools have poor pass rates and produce few university-ready students.

Even learning a trade that requires significant intellectual skills, such as becoming an electrician, is problematic with poor school results.

Inequality

It is the lack of access to tertiary education and training that is not only causing South Africa to become one of the most unequal societies on Earth, but also inhibits economic development. A few years back it was reported that there was a shortage of over 800,000 skilled people in the job market. Programs like rapid roll-out of renewable energy are likely to be hampered by this skills shortage.

Get this right, and we will no longer have to wonder how black economic empowerment breaks out of a narrow definition of a small group who enrich themselves while the majority stay poor.

While it is true that fee-free schools have massive resource constraints (class sizes around 50, compared with half that number of less at fee-paying schools; under-qualified teachers, no budget for maintenance, inadequate or non-existent libraries and labs, etc.), that is not the only problem. If one in nine of these schools can do well, the rest could too. The problem is political, not technical – the government is not willing to take realistic steps to solve the problem.

A starting point

So what can the rest of us do?

In the past there have been tutoring schemes run by outsiders such as universities, but these have limited value. The real deep issue is that school kids in dysfunctional schools are being told day in and day out not to have high expectations. Many of the townships where they live look like trash heaps. Teachers discourage initiative, and employment opportunities for those who exit school are very limited.

An important part of education theory is self efficacy, your belief in your own ability to complete a task. If everything in your life tells you that all you can expect is failure, that is a major dampener on self efficacy. Self efficacy is important because a major component of learning is pushing through hard problems and learning from mistakes. If you have no self-belief, you give up when things get hard, and take mistakes as failure.

Add to this that many families in poorer communities have no history of education, and the very concept of education is mystified.

Outside interventions are ineffective if they serve to heighten the sense of lack of self-worth and perpetuate the mystification of education. Education is something handed down by the “other”, rather than something to be internalized and built on.

How can we change this?

A new approach

One approach in education that has been very effective if done right is peer tutoring. Tutors from the same class as the student demystify education because they show the learners that someone from their own group can master the material. The tutors also gain a benefit because teaching others is a great way to learn.

I propose then that those who have the interest and motivation to run tutoring schemes change the approach. Instead of going to depressed communities to tutor, they should train members of the target classes in tutoring the week’s material then send them back to the community to run tutoring sessions in small groups. This approach has a number of benefits:

• demystifying education – if tutoring is mastered by members of your own class, education is no longer something that can only occur if strangers are present handing it down
• building leaders – the tutors self-efficacy is further enhanced by their tutoring role, which naturally puts them in a leadership role
• scalability – community members with subject knowledge can train up tutors who then take their knowledge to the class, which means far fewer subject experts are needed

If this approach works, we will have many more university-ready students, which will lead us to another problem: how to fund them. Let’s worry about that one after we have fixed the problem of extremely unequal tertiary education-preparedness.

Some detail

Teaching to a large class

Should it work? Look at the first picture, the traditional education model, in a large class. The teacher is apart from the class, handing information down from a height. It would take a very brave teacher in this scenario to encourage critical thinking in the class. Add to this the problem that many teachers are not well qualified in their subject and that schools in many cases are poorly led, and the surprise is not that most fail but rather that most succeed.

Outsiders tutoring

Now, let us look at the traditional style of intervention, the tutoring scheme. We have learners in smaller groups, imparting subject knowledge in smaller groups. That is an improvement as some interaction is theoretically possible. However for a class with no experience of interacting with teachers, there is a cultural barrier that is hard to break, and the reliance on outsiders does not demystify education. Schemes like this usually work to the extent that while the intervention exists, results improve – but the improvement is often not sustained when the intervention ends.

Outsiders training tutors

My proposed scheme requires two pictures. The first picture illustrates tutor training. Now the groups are much smaller, and it is easier to provoke interaction. The tutors are learning to tutor, so they have to learn to engage with the material. Because they are in a much smaller group when they work with the subject specialists, barriers can be broken down. This culture change is essential for their later success, and a critical part of the success of peer tutoring is that fact that they can go back to their community as non-outsiders and break the barrier to interaction within their own peer group.

Peer tutoring – tutors from the class being tutored

The final picture illustrates the second half of my scheme – the tutors are back in their community, with enough of them to work in small groups. The interactiveness they have learnt in their tutor training should be possible to continue in this setting, since their classmates should not have any barrier to talking.

Will all this work?

What we have been doing so far has not worked. So it is worth trying. Education theory supports the idea; like any idea the test is in the results. It is doable and since all else has failed or produced limited results, it is worth trying something new.

Call me prejudiced

Call me prejudiced: I hate bigots.

Stellenbosch University is the subject of a 35-minute video titled “Luister” disclosing racial problems around town and issues with coping with Afrikaans as a teaching language.

I don’t have enough context to know how big the problem really is, so let’s look at why black students should want to go to an Afrikaans university, given that English is a much more useful language in terms of tapping into international expertise. If you look at options available to students, 2 out of the 5 top-tier universities – University of Cape Town, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Pretoria, Rhodes University and Stellenbosch University – are Afrikaans-language universities. Allowing that Rhodes is pretty small and Pretoria is pretty large, that means about half the places in the country’s top universities are at historically Afrikaans institutions.

Black students of course could choose to go exclusively to the English-language universities, but do the Afrikaans universities want that? Officially not, of course, and their numbers depend on being open to all races because that’s the reality of the society we live in now. Even if they completely privatised, they would still be under pressure to deracialize.

So what are the difficulties?

Most students who have not grown up with Afrikaans do high school in English. This means that lessons in Afrikaans – even if only some of the materials handed out are in Afrikaans – can be a challenge. That can be addressed by a sympathetic environment, by making it socially conducive for black students to mix with native Afrikaans speakers, by encouraging students to help each other with translation in informal study groups and so on.

The problem really starts on the social side. If students are not made to feel welcome and not offered the opportunity for an immersive Afrikaans experience, that heightens the language difficulty.

How bad a problem is it really? As I say I don’t know any more than is in the video, which may leave out a lot of context. What I do know is that the discussion over at YouTube shows there are plenty of people out there with strongly pro-apartheid sentiments. One Johannes S for example spouts all the racist arguments about inherent intellectual inferiority the darker the skin, how segregation is natural and everything else is leftist social engineering, and so on.

Those posting racist comments fail to spot the obvious irony that their commentary validates the point of those demanding transformation.

That takes me to the real deep problem. It is not just about transforming the odd university. It is about transforming our society as a whole. Is the rainbow nation a myth? I think not – there is a lot of good will on all sides. But there is this unpleasant sore that won’t go away. And I do not think it is up to the government to heal it. There is just so much legislation can do, and politicians are not on the whole all that competent.

So let us listen to those from communities that differ from ourselves, understand where they are coming from and engage in a respectful way. Only by making the Johannes S style of discourse so socially unacceptable that it crawls back under the rock from which it emerged will we make the rainbow nation a reality. And that is just the start – we also need to address the practical problems that make South Africa such an unequal society.

The Physics Mafia

In 2002, the South African government re-calibrated funding per student in universities. Instead of all science students attracting the same government subsidy, science students were divided into 3 categories: subjects that were expensive to teach (Physics, Chemistry, life sciences), subjects with less intensive lab requirements (Mathematics) and subjects that are really cheap to teach (Computer Science).

Computer Science extra cheap to teach – cheaper than pure maths? Did you hear that right?

A moment's reflection will show that this is idiotic. Computer science at its most theoretical is pure maths. At its most applied, it is a kind of engineering (which is in the higher category, along with mathematical sciences – not the highest category, with physics etc.).

Despite numerous protests, this idiocy has persisted.

What's going on: is the SA government run by idiots?

It seems not (entirely): this information comes from the universities which are run by idiots; the government has only been stupid in believing them.

What these rankings represent is not what these subjects should cost to teach, but what they have historically cost.

Physics has been expensive for some time because it attracts low student numbers, has a relatively high fraction of senior academics (hence with more expensive salaries) and most physics departments have a generous complement of lab staff. Computer Science, on the other hand, is a relatively new discipline, without many senior academics and without lab staff.

The lack of lab staff is the most serious differentiator, and feeds back to the other major difference in numbers of senior academics. For a typical Physics first year class, the lecturer just shows up for lectures. Lab staff take care of pracs, and tutors take care of tutorials. Since the fundamentals are largely settled (most Physics developed in the last 200 years is considered advanced, and is not seen in big classes), the same lab exercises can be recycled every year, and lab equipment can last decades. Lab staff do not need specialist skills in demand in industry, and can be trained up off the street. This means that running large classes (e.g., Physics for engineers) is not particularly onerous. Up the scale, Physics is not particularly popular as a major, so level 2 and above classes are small, and lecturing small classes of keen students is a whole lot less effort than handling big classes of students of wide variations in ability and motivation. And of course running labs is a whole lot easier even in this scenario with trained lab staff. The result? Physics academics have a fair amount of free time to write papers and build their CVs.

In Computer Science, the situation is reversed. The subject (despite the odd downturn in demand) has been more popular than Physics for decades, resulting in much larger classes at level 2 and above. On the other hand, most Computer Science departments in South Africa have no lab staff. Their technical staff capacity is usually sufficient to maintain the servers, networks and lab computers, but not to set up and manage exercises. This puts a major additional burden on academics – at all levels from introductory to advanced classes. A moment's reflection would reveal that failing to employ support staff is a false economy: if someone with a PhD and 20 years' experience is doing work that a technician could do, you are in effect paying a technician the salary of a person with a PhD and 20 years' experience. From the point of view of academics, building a research track record is significantly more difficult than in Physics. There is very little time to spare while running courses. Only by attracting research students do you stand much chance of producing significant output. But it's much easier to attract research students if you already have interesting outputs.

So why is this happening? Physics has a cosy position in South Africa. Even in the best funded higher education systems, Physics departments have been closed because they are not attracting students (in the UK, 20 Physics departments have closed over the last decade). Yet in South Africa, universities persist in the 19th century view that Physics is the only real science (captured in Rutherford's claim that "All science is either physics or stamp collecting"). The reason? Physics academics have been very good at putting their case that they are brilliant researchers. No doubt some of them are. But I wonder how well they would do if their lab staff were removed from their undergrad classes. Perhaps we could try the experiment with just one big first year class.

So should Computer Science be cheaper than Physics, even taking all this into account? It's hard to see why. You can teach a perfectly good undergrad Physics curriculum with 20-year-old equipment and lab staff without higher degrees. Computer Science by contrast does not have settled fundamentals, and computers go obsolete fast: few industry users keep a computer longer than 3 years. Worse, the skills needed to set up and maintain computer labs are in heavy demand in industry: look for job ads with keywords like "network administrator" or "server administrator". Add in the job descriptions for the sort of lab staff taken for granted in Physics, and you have a real problem: you need skilled programmers – also a hot commodity in industry.

Should we care?

Aside from the fact that the South African government has made ICT a central component of its economic development plan, there is the general question of how best to spend limited resources. Physics could be run at an acceptable level if a lot less pleasant for academics on a significantly lower budget. Making Physics academics spend more time in undergrad labs would be an imposition on their time but there is an oversupply of Physics academics worldwide, so they would not have much option to protest. On the other hand, freeing up Computer Science academics to do more research could have a very significant effect because there is another variable not yet discussed: Computer Science research is on the whole a lot cheaper than Physics research, because many of the big breakthrough areas in Physics require extremely exotic, expensive equipment. On the other hand, one of the great success stories in Computer Science has been collapsing cost of computing, opening up an increasing range of low-cost research opportunities.

In summary: by pretending the Computer Science is very cheap to teach while Physics is expensive, South African universities are shooting themselves in the foot. It would be much cheaper to set South Africa up as a world-class centre of Computer Science research, than a world-class centre of Physics research. What's more, they could attract major government funding – instead of the current fiasco, where the government is sinking major resources into the CSIR's Meraka institute without much to show for it ... funding which should have gone to the universities.

What about the other "expensive" subjects? Physics and Chemistry are lumped together as Physical Sciences which is in itself a major inaccuracy: Chemistry (along with life sciences) has major expenses of lab consumables, justifying a higher price tag. Whether this makes high-consumable lab subjects inherently more expensive than Computer Science, where lab infrastructure is in effect a consumable remains questionable – but they at least do have a case for being more expensive than Physics or pure maths. On the other hand, these subjects also have an army of lab staff. I remember a biologist at the University of the Witwatersrand some years ago complaining how consequent on funding cuts, they no longer had a person to call on to wash their cars after a field trip. So tough. I wish I had their problems.

Why this apparent trade between Computer Science and Physics? Wouldn't everyone score if Computer Science was moved up the scale? Governments have a notorious inability to scale up university funding to changed circumstances. If a relatively popular subject attracted a higher notch in the funding formula and the overall funding didn't increase, the extra funding for that subject would have to come from other areas of the university. The obvious target would be a subject that has low student numbers and is expensive to teach ... like Physics. (To be fair, I suspect other lab subjects would also have to be cut a bit because Physics wouldn't be big enough on its own.)

By allowing physicists to get away with this unbalanced funding model, they are doing not only Computer Scientists a disservice, but also society as a whole; the differences in research costs feed directly to differences in the ability to make an industrial and societal impact. In Physics, doing something at the level of inventing the transistor requires a massively funded research lab with Nobel laureate-level scientists. The Computer Science equivalent of inventing the world-wide-web requires a commodity PC with a free operating system.

The solution? Universities should be brave and back their Computer Science departments to deliver. If a few other departments would have to pull in their belts as a consequence, they would survive. It's not as if they have anywhere else to go.

Here are a few other related articles in this series:

• SA government's CS research strategy


• Free software and CS funding in SA

Computer Science in South Africa

In 2002, the South African government announced two things: a change in the university funding model which cut funding per computer science student by 40%, putting it below pure maths, let alone comparable subjects like physics or electrical engineering.

Around the same time, the government announced that it wanted to found an “ICT university”.

Clearly, the government thought the universities were doing a lousy job: it cut the funding in an area so important, the president thought there should be a dedicated university in the area.

Let’s look at publications and citations for the top 4 universities in the country, according to the Times Higher Education Supplement international ranking (available through Top Universities), from best down: Cape Town, Witwatersrand (Wits), Kwazulu Natal (merged from Natal and Durban-Westville) and Pretoria.

The following are all searches on the combined indexes, Science Citation Index Expanded, 1900-present; Social Sciences Citation Index, 1956-present; Arts & Humanities Citation Index, 1975-present (all searches done on 30 May 2007).

As you can see, all of the results show some level of research activity with some citations – but nothing brilliant (click on the pictures for larger versions).


Cape Town: 59 publications, 139 citations, 2.36 citations per item.


Wits: 46 publications, 58 citations, 1.26 citations per item.


Natal (includes Kwazulu Natal): 86 publications, 238 citations, 2.77 citations per item.


Pretoria: 84 publications, 151 citations, 1.80 citations per item.

The Natal results are skewed by the fact that there was a period when computer science was combined with geology, so these results aren’t an accurate basis for comparison and I will not consider these further. The others though present a consistent picture. The higher ranked universities have a higher publication count per academic (Pretoria has a much higher head count that Wits and Cape Town), but the general numbers are in approximately the same ballpark. The Wits figures should be considered in the light of the university having badly fumbled the ball on the management of the subject. The School of Computer Science there in recent years has collapsed from 12 academics to only 5, and recruiting is a shambles.

In any case, the government clearly didn’t think all this was so great. The ICT university idea however was replaced by creating a research institute, the Meraka Institute. Meraka has a few new people but is mostly comprised of the CSIR’s ICT division, Mikomtek, which has been rolled into Meraka.

Why, you may wonder, did the CSIR get this funding boost, rather than placing Meraka in a university? Clearly, if the universities are no good, the CSIR, and in particular, Mikomtek, must be a whole lot better. So let’s look at their numbers.


Mikomtek: 6 publications, 2 citations, 0.33 citations per item.


Meraka: 2 publications, 0 citations, 0.00 citations per item.

Now here is an interesting challenge for the reader: explain why the combination of Mikomtek and Meraka is so much better than any university in South Africa, to the extent that the CSIR has been made the sole custodian of this new bucket of money. Of course Meraka is in its infancy and could do better in future. It has after all only been going since May 2005. However, in 2 years, I would have thought that a well-funded institute would have recruited high fliers who would have published more than 2 papers that have made it into the top research indexes.

Perhaps the CSIR’s outputs are in other areas than publications. They generate a large number of press releases, for sure – and those are not listed in things like the science citation index. But that obviously counts for a lot in winning political support.

What about impacts on the economy which can’t be measured by publications?

The universities named here (and of course there are others) have produced thousands of computer science graduates between them. An organization which is not degree-granting like the CSIR has to do a lot to match that scale of contribution. One would expect many publications (oops) and other measurable impacts, such as commercial spin-outs.

For the latter point, let’s consider the case of commercializing the Internet.

In the 1990s, when the technology wasn’t commonplace, many small startups sprang up, touting the concept to business. The CSIR jumped in rather late and despite its massive government subsidy, it wasn’t able to compete. The top service provider in South Africa today, The Internet Solution, was one of those small startups, and was started by Wits computer science graduates.

Commercializing the internet is but one example; I believe it is up to the CSIR to make a case, rather than for me to tear them down, because the case for better funding for the universities is so clear. Universities produce graduates; the CSIR consumes resources. They need to demonstrate that they do so to useful effect.

Disclaimer: I applied for a position at Meraka in June 2006, and am still waiting for a definite response. I applied for a Wits position too, and am awaiting the promised feedback (no word for almost 3 months), so you can see that I am trying to curry favour. For the record, here is my publication record by the same measure: 19 publications, only 1 citation – fair, not great. Not quite 3 times the entire output of Mikomtek plus Meraka combined. (My actual output is significantly higher than this – but to compare like with like, I am using the same measure throughout.) Then again, if I google on my name, I only get 28,500 hits; Meraka gets 160,000 [counted 14 June 2007] – those press releases really work. I should try that.