Sir, what is an average?

Sir, what is an Average?

This year I had one of my life’s truly shocking experiences at UNAM in my second week of class this year. I teach a moderately technical but compulsory course in Basic Microeconomics which covers 950 first year students enrolled in the faculty. At the end of the second class a young lady, fresh out of school asked me after the lecture, ‘Sir, what is an average’. This question was, to say the least, unexpected. My first reaction was disbelief that a high school graduate was asking such a question. Later camethe experience of shock, which I recognize so clearly from the experiences of my youth during the war in Indochina.When you suffer shock it is common that your visionnarrowsand all I could see was this young girl. I answered her question and then, as is so common with trauma, I simply put it to the back of my mind. It was only at 3 AM, the devil’s hour, that I woke up in a sweat and told my poor wife about the experience.She was not in the slightest amused about being woken up by a vexed teacher mumbling about a student who clearly understood almost no mathematics.

It is relatively easy to dismiss this as simply as one experience with one student at UNAM but unfortunately this was just one case and is symptomatic of a much bigger problem with the education system in Namibia. On the first day I arrived from Botswana to Namibia on a very cold day in June of last year I was put in freezing office with no heating- UNAM’s equivalent of ‘trial by refrigeration’. On my desk was a test from the previous occupant for a course called Business Mathematics which is a course taught to all first year students in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences. The test, like the young lady enquiring as to the meaning of an average, was a revelation. It contained questions like what is ½ +2/5? It was about the level of grade 7-9 arithmetic taught in many schools throughout the world. I went to the then Head of Department of Economics and asked what was a question paper like that doing at a university? He smiled at me and said ‘That’s not half the problem, some 80% of the students failed the course and they are up in arms about it’. I asked around about the course and found that it had been taught by three separate departments at UNAM, Mathematics, Management and now Economics. None had brilliant results and it had been, in the words of one of the teachers, ‘dumbed down’ to grade 9 level as the quality of students coming out of the school system worsened over the years.

The fact that 80% of the 800 odd students sitting such a course at this level  failed it was a clear indication of just how weak the nation’s secondary school system has become and how clearly it is failing the children of the nation and by extension, Namibia’s economy. Students who complete high school and do not know such basic arithmetic are almost certainly bound to end up unemployed or in low paid employment.

UNAM cannot be held responsible for this mess though the finger is frequently pointed in that direction. It is paid by government to educate the nation’s youth and can only take what the school system delivers to its doors. The fault as well as the solution clearly lies with the education system and thegovernment needs to recognize that the nation is suffering an education crisis. How does one deal with this? The first is to begin by recognizing that we are there is a math education crisis and that desperate times call for desperate measures. The Minister of Education has devoted considerable resource to in-service training of the many teachers who are not qualified to teach and therein lies much of the problem.

When I discussed this matter at UNAM I was told that these outcomes were a result of apartheid. As someone who saw apartheid at its ugliest and fought against it there is no doubt that it has left an indelible scar that will take a very long time to heal. But the struggle was fought for many reasons- principally for the dignity and equality of all men and women irrespective of race or color. However,there were also subsidiary objectives, one of which was to assure that Namibian (and South African) students got a first class and not an institutionalized third class education and,with the end of apartheid that Namibians would be able to determine and write their own history. Arguing that apartheid, which ended nearly a generation ago, is still responsible for all that we now see seems to be a denial of these two subsidiary objectives- giving Namibian children the right to a first class education and writing the nation’s history by a free citizenry, not by people who see themselves asthe eternal victims of a brutal history.

Once the denial of this problem ends providing schools with much more resources as well as temporary math teachers from abroad may well alleviate the problem of math education in Namibia. In time as more and more UNAM graduates will find it difficult to find well-paying jobs, as is happening throughout the region, teaching math will come to be seen as one of the few good employment opportunities and these foreign teachers will not be needed permanently. If we fail to address this issue of the quality of High School education now we will condemn an entire generation of young Namibian high school graduates to being unemployable. The school system is in effect, handing out permanent poverty and unemployment vouchers to the nation’s children and reform is essential.

These are the views of Professor Roman Grynberg and not necessarily those of UNAM, where he is employed.