ON THE WATER
Angie Motshekga’s verbal gymnastics lead on to nonparallel bars
All we know is the unknown unknowns vastly outstrip our knowledge of the degree of trouble SA’s education system is in, writes Neels Blom
Pity poor Donald Rumsfeld, the former US secretary of defence in George W Bush’s administration, for his legacy will forever be his infamous linguistic mastication on the elements of knowledge, thus to save face on behalf of the administration while cutting it some slack in case it had to recant its justifications for invading Iraq. He said: "Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know." This Delphic indulgence was not helpful to a world expecting evidence or otherwise of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but it did give us a workable framework for the assessment of knowledge. If we applied it to the 2016 matric cohort’s results, what do we know about the South African state-educated cohort’s knowl...
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