School-leavers fully prepared for unemployment, says Education Department

The national Department of Education has hailed as a “runaway success” more than a decade of outcomes-based education, theoretical cul-de-sacs, wholesale cooking of results and being held hostage by robber-barons posing as teachers’ unions, saying that school-leavers are finally being adequately prepared for a lifetime of unemployment.

This morning Suxtobiyu Khumalo, head of the department’s Committee for Planning Potential Education Outcomes That Result Potentially from Planning By Committee, said that South Africa could now consider itself a world leader in providing school-leavers with the critical lack of non-skills they needed to be competitively uncompetitive in today’s over-saturated unemployment market.

“Like the academically disinclined 22-year-old in Matric, our motto is: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” said Khumalo. “You know, like the national education policy for the last five years: do the same thing every year and hope for exponentially improving results, and when those don’t happen, do the same thing again, except this time make disappointed comments in the Sunday newspapers before you get redeployed as Deputy Minister of Forestry.”

According to Khumalo, the Committee’s research had concluded that traditional education was too focussed on equipping students for productive, professional careers.

“Everybody knows that unemployment is a growth industry at the moment, and if you’re going to get in on the ground floor – or in the gutter, where many of our finest graduates now find themselves – you’ve got to plan accordingly.”

He said that as a result, most schoolchildren in South Africa were now placed in “post-school simulation scenario role-play simulations – did I already say ‘simulation’?”

“We provide a totally realistic model of their careers as unemployed people,” he explained. “They sit in dark, overcrowded rooms, and are sporadically shouted at, ordered around or molested by people in leadership positions.”

He said many graduates had written to him, often in soot scribbled on UIF forms, thanking him for preparing them for the realities of modern South Africa.

“At least I think they were thanking me,” he said. “Or maybe they were asking for medical attention and emergency rations. That’s the great thing about Outcomes-based Education: you can totally make up your own mind about stuff.”

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