How to make education relevant

If one had to look at teaching as a recipe what ingredients would one need to make teaching in South Africa relevant to and for South Africa? Currently we look to other nations to see what their end product (education) looks like and them use their ingredients here to try and get the same result. The problem with that is their recipe and our recipe is not the same, so how can we take ingredients from a completely different recipe, use it for our recipe and expect to get the same result?

Yes I am using education as a metaphor. Lets say education all over the world is cake, so generally with cake the main ingredients are the same but the recipe changes slightly are a lot depending on the cake. Let me elaborate. The USA education system is a chocolate cake, the UK education system is vanilla sponge cake and the South African education system is red velvet cake. All three types of cake need flour and eggs and baking powder etc. but each one needs different ingredients to make it the cake it is set out to be. Another factor that affects the end product is how it is made and what is used to make it, for example the USA may have state of the art oven's they use to make their chocolate cakes whereas the UK only have wood fired ovens and in South Africa we have cast iron ovens. This affects the time and process that goes into making the cake.

In other words education all over the world has the same purpose of educating their people but the why's and hows look different in every nation. There are many things that affect the why's and the hows which is different for each nation. The resources and conditions all over the world are also different. Which all points to the fact that we can not use the what we see other countries and using. We can learn from them, take what we see is good BUT then adapt it to make it work here in South Africa to suite our needs and purposes.

Our education system in South Africa must be developed by our people for our people. Because we are called the rainbow nation and are made up of people with so many different needs our education system needs to be flexible and inclusive enough to include ALL. We can not have one way of learning and teaching and testing we need many ways that all achieve the same purpose!