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Making a Plan: Our Greatest Strength or Our Biggest Weakness?

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  There are few phrases more South African than: “Don’t worry, we’ll make a plan.” Car won’t start? We’ll make a plan. Power’s off? Make a plan. Water’s off? Make another plan. Pothole swallowed the left front wheel? Someone knows a guy. It is one of the things I love most about South Africans. We are resourceful, adaptable and almost pathologically unwilling to be defeated by circumstances. Give us a problem and, before most countries have established a commission of inquiry, someone in Boksburg has built a solution out of two extension leads, a pool pump and something he found in the garage. It’s magnificent. But lately I’ve started wondering whether our remarkable ability to make a plan has also become part of the problem. Because if citizens continually find ways around dysfunction, what incentive is there to fix the dysfunction in the first place? The Country of Plan B South Africans don't really have backup plans anymore. We have backup lifestyles . Electricity unreliable? So...
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The University Myth: Are We Preparing Children for University... or for Life?

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  For decades, South African parents have been sold a very simple equation: Good school = Good Matric = Good University = Good Job = Successful Life. It's beautifully neat. It's wonderfully reassuring. And it's becoming increasingly outdated. Because while schools are still obsessing over getting children into university , universities themselves are busy asking a completely different question: "How do we prepare graduates for a world that no longer looks like the one we built our degrees for?" It's a little like training someone to become an expert horse rider... just as the rest of the world invents the motorcar. The University Pedestal Ask almost any parent what they want for their child and somewhere near the top you'll hear: "I just want them to get into a good university." Not... "I want them to become resilient." Or... "I want them to be adaptable." Or... "I want them to be emotionally intelligent." University...
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Exam Fever: How We Turned Children into Tiny Corporate Executives

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  There’s something deeply bizarre about modern exam season. Perfectly rational adults - people who can normally operate motor vehicles and use coffee machines unsupervised - suddenly transform into high-performance academic stockbrokers the moment their child writes a test. The house changes overnight. Whiteboards appear. Timetables emerge. Stress levels rise to DEFCON 1. And somewhere in the distance, a Grade 4 child is quietly wondering why everyone is behaving like they’re preparing for open-heart surgery instead of a simple cycle test. Welcome to exam season: the annual tradition where society collectively forgets that children are, in fact, children. The irony is magnificent. We talk about holistic education, emotional well-being, resilience and “21st-century learning” - and then the moment exams arrive, we throw all of that out the window faster than Eskom throws out a load shedding schedule. Suddenly, the message becomes: Marks matter most. Pressure equals success. Panic...
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What it Means to be South African

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  How to Smile While the WiFi, Power and Government Collapse Simultaneously Being South African is difficult to explain to foreigners. You can try, of course. But somewhere between explaining load-shedding schedules, bakkie culture, hadedas, potholes, traffic-light “entrepreneurs” and why we braai during a thunderstorm, their eyes glaze over and they assume we’re making it up. Which, honestly, sounds fair. Because South Africa is not a normal country. It’s more like a social experiment run by a committee that lost the instruction manual; or a national improv performance where nobody received the script! It’s a place held together with duct tape, optimism and a WhatsApp group. And yet… somehow… we love it here. Deeply. Passionately. Confusingly. We Live in Permanent Improvisation Mode South Africans have developed a survival skill unmatched anywhere on Earth: the ability to adapt instantly to complete nonsense. Power goes out? Generator. Water cuts? JoJo tank. Traffic lights broke...
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Stress Is Becoming the Silent Saboteur of Schooling

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  We talk endlessly about standards, results, pass rates, curriculum coverage and “academic excellence”. What we talk about far less is the thing quietly wrecking all of it: stress . Not the occasional, healthy pressure that sharpens focus. I mean the chronic, grinding, ambient stress that sits in classrooms like bad lighting. The kind that follows teachers home, wakes students at 2am and turns schooling into survival rather than growth. And that matters because anxiety is not just unpleasant. It is anti-learning. Research consistently shows that stress and anxiety can impair working memory, attention, learning and memory retrieval – sadly, the exact mental functions schools rely on most. So, when we build school cultures around relentless pressure, we should not be surprised when children disengage and teachers leave. We designed the conditions ourselves. The South African School Stress Problem South Africa is not dealing with one neat, tidy version of school stress. We have multi...
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The Happy Meal Curriculum: Why Our Kids Deserve More Than Just a Toy

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  It’s hard to ignore the irony: we insist our children eat fewer Happy Meals, but we’re feeding them education systems that look suspiciously like a drive-thru menu. Quick, cheap, predictable and utterly devoid of nourishment. Welcome to the McDonaldisation of Education. For further reading check out George Ritzer’s "McDonaldization" and what he claims is a sociological concept describing how the principles of the fast-food restaurant - efficiency, calculability, predictability and control - are increasingly dominating sectors of society worldwide - education being one of them. If your child is in school right now, chances are they’re not learning how to think. They’re learning how to perform. Dress right. Sit still. Colour inside the lines. Write the test. Ace the test. Repeat. It’s not education, it’s factory production. The goal? Push out a neat little product that can tick all the boxes on the school’s glossy brochure. "Look, 100% Matric pass rate! Just don’t ask ho...
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The Road to Matric: A Highway to Nowhere (With Excellent Signage)

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  The Road to Matric: A Highway to Nowhere (With Excellent Signage) Brace yourselves! Every year, right on schedule, independent schools roll out their favourite party trick: “100% Matric Pass Rate.” It’s splashed across websites, printed on banners, whispered reverently at open days. Parents beam. Boards applaud. Marketing teams uncork something bubbly... And education quietly dies in the corner. Because somewhere along the way, we decided that twelve years of schooling could be judged by a single number, produced in one exam, by a teenager running on caffeine, cortisol and fear. Welcome to The Road to Matric - a long, straight highway where curiosity is roadkill and childhood is an optional extra. The Matric Myth (Now with Extra Panic) Matric has become the holy grail of South African schooling. Not learning. Not growth. Not character. Matric. From the moment a child enters school, everything points in one direction: Assess. Measure. Rank. Repeat. Primary school children are trai...
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