27 November 2009
	Did You Hear?

A grocer, while delivering orders in his station wagon, runs down and injures an old woman. The woman sues and is awarded an amount large enough to drive the man out of business. After difficult times, he manages to accumulate enough to try again. But a few months after opening his doors, he hits an old man with his delivery truck. The man sues and collects big damages, enough to ruin the merchant. One peaceful Sunday the grocer is sitting in his living room when his little boy runs in and shouts: "Daddy, daddy. Mommy's been run over by a big bus." The grocer's eyes fill with tears and, trembling with emotion, he cries: "Thank the Lord, my luck's changed at last." Three men are sitting at a bar discussing coincidences. The first man says: "My wife was reading A Tale of Two Cities and she gave birth to twins." "That's funny," the second man says, "my wife was reading The Three Musketeers and she gave birth to triplets." The third man leaps up : "Good grief, I have to rush home!" When they ask him what the problem is, he says: "When I left the house my wife was reading Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves." Johnny's mother looks out of the window and notices him on the lawn, "playing church" with their cat. He has the cat sitting quietly and is preaching to it. She smiles and goes about her work. A while later she hears loud meowing and hissing. She runs to the window to see Johnny baptising the cat in a tub of water. She calls out: "Johnny, stop that! The cat is afraid of water!" Johnny looks up at her and says: "Well, he should have thought about that before he joined my church." A woman takes her 16-year-old daughter to the doctor. The doctor says: "Okay, Mrs Jones, what's the problem?" The mother says: "It's my daughter, Debbie. She keeps getting these cravings, she's putting on weight, and is sick most mornings." The doctor gives Debbie a thorough examination, then turns tless bang for its buck. China's literacy level, 90%, is higher than the US's. It requires its primary schools' maths and science teachers to have degrees in those subjects. Fewer than half of such teachers in the US have relevant degrees. In SA, the figure is less than 10%. Since 1994, the education department has managed to get rid of its best-qualified teachers, mangle the curriculum, abolish teacher monitoring and implement the inappropriate outcomes-based education. And though onerous labour laws have contributed to the unacceptably high level of youth unemployment, the poor education these youngsters have received deserves a good part of the blame. Badly educated, ill-disciplined teachers appear to have been a large part of the problem. The second "weakest factor" - labour market inefficiency - has allowed poor teachers to survive as it has been impossible to fire them. This has also meant good teachers are underpaid and faced with unnecessary bureaucracy. There now seems to be some commitment to rectifying the education system. The department has a simple, measurable objective for the coming years: the literacy level of grade 3 and 7 pupils. So it will be easy to measure progress on this front. I have no doubt that soon I will be in London again and food in Sainsbury's will again look expensive. The rand will weaken in the next two to three years. However, for SA to begin to take advantage of any such weakness, government needs to address the factors within its control. Two factors that could vastly improve SA's competitiveness are education and the labour market. Unfortunately, government's desire to please the unions means the latter is likely to go backwards. And if underperforming teachers cannot be fired, the risk is that progress in education will be limited. Moola is a director with Macquarie First South