STICKY DOWNWARDS
BRONWYN NORTJE: It’s about the manners, silly
With low productivity, monstrous unemployment and dire educational levels, there's much to be worried about. So let's start by teaching manners
SA has a huge skills gap. It is this skills gap that the International Monetary Fund politely refers to as one of the "structural bottlenecks" that will prevent the SA economy from growing more than 1.75% a year in the medium term. To put it bluntly, the majority of South Africans are very poorly educated and our education system is a disgrace. But what if I told you that teaching young people respect, kindness and good manners could be more effective in securing our economic future than improving the matric pass rate? As things stand, more than half of our children drop out of school before they even reach matric. For those who manage to make it through the system, less than half have sufficient skills to be employed anywhere. Post-school training is equally dire; the universities are already over-capacity and receive tens of thousands more applications than there are places. The Sector Education & Training Authorities were introduced almost two decades ago and have all but destroy...
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