Earlier this week Derek Luyt of the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM) generously conducted a ‘numeracy-for-journalists’ workshop in our newsroom. It was extremely valuable and we hope to put the knowledge he shared with us to good use.
Earlier this week Derek Luyt of the Public Service Accountability Monitor (PSAM) generously conducted a ‘numeracy-for-journalists’ workshop in our newsroom. It was extremely valuable and we hope to put the knowledge he shared with us to good use.
The rationale behind the workshop was simply that journalists and editors are usually not very good at basic arithmetic. Quite frankly, most of us are terrified of numbers, so quite often our articles lack sufficient data to back up an argument or, even worse; we don’t interpret the figures correctly.
There are probably quite a few journalists who entered the profession because they thought they would never have to deal with numbers – big mistake there. There is probably a wide variety of reasons why journalists in particular and South Africans in general, are afraid of arithmetic, but perhaps the most obvious explanation for our bad maths is because we have not been given a solid education in the subject.
Our education system has been churning out pupils who are poor at maths and then a certain percentage of them end up being teachers, passing on a fuzzy understanding of arithmetic to the next generation.
Information technology (IT) is currently the biggest growth sector in the world, and if you don’t have a good understanding of mathematics you will not be able to produce microchips, cellphones, iPads or anything else that has digital intestines.
However, instead of trying much harder to improve maths education in South Africa, government has taken the lazy way out by introducing Maths Literacy, or should that be Maths Lite?
This short-sighted approach aims to make MECs look good when the final matric results are published, and has nothing to do with ensuring South Africa’s competitive ability to survive in the 21st century.
When the education MEC of the Eastern Cape announced the 2010 matric results he very proudly revealed how the education system had failed his own understanding of mathematical concepts. He said, “The class of 2010 boasts a pass rate of 58.3%, which is an increase of 7.3% compared to the 51% achieved in 2009”. His statement is incorrect.
What he meant to say is that there has been an increase of 7.3 percentage POINTS in the pass rate. Alternatively he could have said (correctly) that the pass rate in the province had increased by 14.31%. But who would have believed that?
