With matric exams done and dusted, we can look forward to stories of exceptionalism hitting our inboxes soon. Take for example, twins Divano and Diego Blankenberg, raised by a single mother in Atlantis in the Western Cape, who matriculated at the end of 2021 with nine distinctions between them, making them the first members of their family ever to attend university.

Without taking away from this extraordinary achievement, these good news stories mask a bleaker picture of a vastly unequal schooling system where more than 25% of learners drop out of school before they even reach matric.

The truth is, right now our schools don’t necessarily teach the right stuff. And they don’t teach it well enough; even the best teachers are constrained by a lack of resources and top-down decision-making. From apartheid-era educational inequalities, into the democratic era, education is in crisis and increasingly, smart and ambitious young South Africans are being left behind in a rapidly changing world.

The ripple effects of inadequate schooling are making themselves felt across the economy. Those students who do make it into tertiary education are often unable to present plausible arguments to support and sell their ideas, their writing ability can be poor and unstructured, and their confidence is generally rock bottom.

Too many fail to even graduate. In short, while many South Africans are making tremendous strides and building businesses to end generations of poverty, the odds are very often stacked against their success.

Changing the odds starts with building a scaffold of support

Changing these odds is critical to unlocking economic growth and really, this calls for a whole new approach to teaching and learning. Post-matric institutions — including business schools — have an important role to play here in driving change. While business schools are mostly associated with the MBA — which is a master’s level degree — the sheer scale of need in South Africa makes it imperative to pay attention to all levels of learning, and more than that, to provide a pathway to allow students who may lack the right foundations to achieve an MBA should they want to.

In an education system full of holes, we need to think about how we can construct a scaffold to provide smart, ambitious and capable people — whether they are coming in at a junior level or have been working for many years — something to hold on to, to keep them learning and growing.

This could take the form of providing templates for initial assignments, rather than just allowing students to tackle these from scratch, or it could be guidance from a writing centre, or a form of coaching and mentorship designed to build people’s confidence, which may have been eroded over the years.

Thus, it’s not just about what we teach but how we teach it. We might have the best curriculum in the world, but if we don’t create the right learning container, learning — for the most part — may not be as effective. A structure that guides students and validates their own experiences could help to ensure that the seeds of their ideas have a safe place in which to germinate and grow into purposeful careers and innovative and well-run businesses that solve real problems in the world and generate employment sustainably.

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Opening the door to vulnerability

A structured learning process that meets people where they are at, can also create the space for students to let their guard down a bit. There is so much pressure on us to appear smart and tough that it can be hard to admit you don’t have all the answers; but keeping up appearances is incredibly draining — and it takes away your power.

Author Salman Rushdie said “those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to re-tell it, re-think it, deconstruct it, joke about it and change it as times change — truly are powerless because they cannot think new thoughts.”

Business schools must work towards giving students back their power. A lack of agency can be like having your ankles tied together as you try to run the race. And there is no quick way back to it, it can only start with the slow and painstaking work on self. Herein lies vulnerability — lots of it! You need to be vulnerable to be able to see when you are wrong and then actually sit back and do things differently, because suddenly your blinkers have been taken off, and you can see the periphery that you might never have seen before.

This can be particularly powerful in a group setting. Sociocultural theory asserts that learning is an essentially social process in which the support of co-workers, family members and the wider society and culture all play a role.

As adults, this is really important, and it’s one of the reasons that executive development is such a thriving industry worldwide, because corporates recognise that sending a cohort of employees on a learning journey together can potentially reap more benefits than sending just one person on their own.

Aligning theory with practice

The third key ingredient for a new approach to learning is to make sure that the theory being taught is closely aligned with practice. What is the point of coming out of business school and not having the skills that you need to operate in the work environment?

We need to ensure that if someone is learning something about a change model, for example, they’re able to practise it in their workplace in real time, with real people doing their real jobs with all of the complexities that come with a daily work grind

And then they are asked to write it up and share their story of what they learnt back in the classroom. Story-telling is another powerful feature of our learning scaffold. Hearing how someone like you made it to the top and what mistakes they made along the way is much more powerful than reading a chapter on strategy from a textbook.

None of this is rocket science. By taking a common-sense and human-centred approach to learning that values the innate potential of each learner and creates the space for them to expand their thinking, grow their confidence, and practise what they are learning, we can equip and enable people to achieve more than they dared think possible. 

Of course, this is not the only solution to the education crisis we face in South Africa — it is just one part of a complex puzzle, but it is a part that has been shown to work and it could be scaled up. What we see is that as people gain skills and qualifications, moving up through business schools’ programmes, they gain confidence. They almost always then want to pay their learnings forward. It’s like people naturally want to share their insights and knowledge with their families, children, communities and, of course, in the workplace.

In a very real sense then, investing in one person can help to build a community of practice and learning that stretches far beyond the classroom. This is powerful, this is how change happens. DM

Linda Buckley is Head of Learning Experience and Executive Education Director at Henley Business School, Africa.