Education seems not to be reaching many students now for a number of reasons, including high rates of illiteracy among school leavers; unpreparedness of literate high school leavers for the available jobs; poor work ethics; and the inability to focus and motivate students around a realistic vision of themselves succeeding.

Some seeming repercussions of our weakening education system – short of statistical confirmation – are:

. the high involvement of teenagers in crime;

. the crass and rebellious tone of the music produced and enjoyed by our youths;

. the pervading get-rich-quick syndrome evidenced by the Lotto and other scams;

. the volatile tone of teacher-student-parent ethos in many of our schools and its frequent violent eruptions these days.

It needs no hypothesising by any rocket scientist to discern the cause and effect relationship of these indices. Frustration levels are running high among the stakeholders of the education system. It is time for a new teaching paradigm.

Since the industrial revolution and the ensuing expansions in mining, manufacturing, agriculture, transportation, information technologies and trading, the role of education has been to prepare workers for this growing market. Since the middle of the twentieth century however, this global job market has been shrinking.

Enter the dubious phenomenon called globalisation.

Dubious because it seems to be an initiative of the multinationals to penetrate new markets at the expense of smaller economies as ours. Larger economies are also more poised to supply workers to any part of the globe – we are just dreaming of producing “world-class citizens” through the new thrust in educational transformation. If our educational transformation is going to arrest violence in schools and the wider society, produce “world-class citizens” and prepare students for entrepreneurship or the job market, our students must be refocused. A new teaching paradigm is needed to save our school leavers and ultimately ourselves.