Letter from Limpopo: Thabiso Sekhula asks why 17 years after her own miserable school-to-university experience, she had to help her nephew struggle through the exact same thing
This week has been an incredible highlight for many families who have a matric student. The kids did really well.
However, while we should be rejoicing about things to come, we find ourselves in a place we know all too well. We are with kids who did their best but have nowhere to go or are picking courses at the bottom of the list just to have a place to go to.
This hit me particularly hard because my nephew’s grade 11 results didn’t get him into his first choice. He then had to wait for his final results so that he could try again.
He did really well, but like most of his peers, this week he learned how doing really well may not always be good enough.
It’s taken me an intense week of combing through social media pages, calling department heads and applying at colleges as back-up, but we finally managed to get him into his third choice.
He can always switch to his first in the next semester.
This process cost thousands in resources, and frustrated me — a person who has worked in tech and computers for 12 years. What chance do kids stand who don’t have a tech-savvy aunt?
It’s as if it was copied from my own matric-to-university experience. I hadn’t applied for any options to study, so I ended up queuing outside the Tshwane University of Technology for whatever courses were still available for late applications.
It’s not that I hadn’t passed well, it’s just that information about university applications was not freely available to kids in rural places and there wasn’t internet available for me to do research. I did not know that I needed to apply the year before to get into my first option. I just thought my great results would do the trick.
I can count the number of times my school took us to anything that was about career guidance. It was once, and even that was not practical.
It was only when I was stuck with other late applicants in a late-application queue which resembled the 1994 voters’ queue that I realised what a mess I was in. It was too late to go back and do anything about it. I lost my first and second choices.
It ended well for me, but having a chat with matrics from my old high school this week revealed what a nerve-racking time this still is for kids in the villages.
Most of these kids have an identical story, 17 years later. How can we expect better results from engineers and scientists while we still have huge gaps in critical information?
What about a place kids can go to for help with university applications in September? I can count five municipal offices in my region which could serve this purpose.
It’s not that kids don’t want to obtain the critical skills needed to build the country. But like the self-saboteurs we are, no one has made it a priority to focus on letting high school students know what it is that the world needs and which careers are in demand.
We have kids who are so desperate they will pick any course just so they can leave the village. My late mother used to tell me that in teaching only passion can have an impact on students, because you have to care about the kids doing well and give of yourself to ensure it.
Has the passion died in all of us, that the same terrible story keeps repeating itself decades later – in this country where we have load-shedding up to 12 hours a day and clearly need these skills?
Pictured above: Graduation day at Tshwane University of Technology’s IT department.
Photo by Thabiso Sekhula
