The water Crisis in South Africa.pdf

14 th SANCIAHS SYMPOSIUM, 21-23 September 2009 CE Herold: The Water Crisis in South AfricaFigure 4: Water professional training pipelineAside from the allure of easy access to higher symbols, maths literacy is often promotedbecause of a lack of competent core maths teachers.As implemented, the advent of core maths as a replacement for higher grade maths is afurther setback. This is because geometry has been excised from the mainstream and hasbecome an optional third maths paper, for which the students gain no additional recognition.A further disincentive is that this additional paper has been rendered more difficult by addingmost of the contents of applied maths, which used to be a separate fully accredited subject.Dropping geometry appears to be little more than a thinly disguised cover for the lack ofadequately trained maths teachers. Moreover, most schools do not even offer tuition for the3 rd maths paper. Three dimensional perception and geometry are essential features ofengineering. Their exclusion is perhaps akin to submitting to surgery by a doctor who lacksdepth perception.To make matters worse, the first crop of new matriculants passing through the new educationsystem at the end of 2008 displayed a huge increase in maths grades, which was totallyunsupported by a similar rise in science competence, the two of which have been closelylinked in the past. It has been suggested by competent analysts that the grades may havebeen artificially inflated by up to 25%. This means that a student who in the past would havereceived 35% would now fulfil the minimum 60% requirement for admission to theengineering faculties of many universities. Without exception, universities were surprised bythe phenomenal upsurge in the number of applicants who fulfilled the matriculationrequirements for entry into engineering faculties. For example, grade creep forced the CivilEngineering faculty of Wits University to accept 270 first year students, when they wereC:\Documents and Settings\02569\My Documents\Articles\Institutional\water Crisis in Sa 708-paper C Herold.doc 1511 September 2009