The Thing of Things

It is about twelve days now since my 22nd Re-Birthday. Twenty-two years ago on what has subsequently become a day of infamy, I died on the operating table during emergency surgery for multiple gunshot wounds. Went somewhere learned things and returned. And for twenty-two years now those routinely disturbing ‘travel’ experiences have kept recurring, triggered randomly by some glancing chance: or from the depths of sleep.
 
Most prevalent of these is a somewhat odd idea of the ‘Things of Things’ [as opposed to the ‘Internet of things’] … Chaos determines that a small event [a thing] can have profound effects on other ‘things’. And I have learned that CHAOS RULES.
 
Take for instance the currently hypothesized idea [with suitable backup] that a Comet strike on the planet some 12 Thousand odd years ago wiped out a pre-existing civilization, about which we have no knowledge, of its existence… As if an early version of Rome’s ultimate nemesis the Vandals; or even an ISIS [Daesch[sic]] gathering of disaffected billions consumed the past, and obliterated all knowledge of it and persecuted mercilessly any who held any view to the contrary.
 
It could even be speculated that the glorious cornucopia of pictographic stuff we have been privy to with Gobekli Tepe, a recently ‘discovered’ place in S.E. Turkey associated with this idea of a comet strike 12,000 years ago, was deliberately chosen and [seemingly carefully disguised] hidden; because the vanished civility could [hypothetically since we know nothing of them] have been a digitally literate society such as we are becoming, perhaps as much as we are becoming… and therefore what would we leave were we obliterated by alleged chunks off a comet that generated “The Great Flood” referred to in a litany of ancient myths and legends: and an era called the Younger Dryas.
 

Assuming the story represented by the unfolding remains of the ruin called Gobleki Tepe has any validity, then it raises the real question of why did it take us the best part of 6000 years to recover, and even then why was it only to the level represented by Akkadia and Sumeria.
 
And here we are once again on the edge of memory loss, and thus drawn, to often fallacious conclusions, in hopes of triggering truth… whatever it is.
 
Someone, often a bureaucrat, makes a decision about some pet peeve… or to resolve some issue… and down the line a comet strike occurs and chaos theory suggests linkages. For instance a recent entertaining viral piece of social media, drew attention to a chain of decision making that extended over two thousand years.The chain starts with a decision to construct a Roman chariot to accommodate the rear ends of the pair of warhorses intended to pull it… and the viral piece goes on to demonstrate the effect of that decision, on the design ultimately for rockets being sent into space.
 
Thus it was that I came to ruminate on yet another burst of student rage over the payment of fees to attend universities that seemingly most of many are unable to handle with any comfort: either in respect of Fees or acquisition of knowledge.And centtral to my rumination was the thoughts i had on learning of an abrupt, unaccountable leap in the “qualification” rate of final year high school learner in 2013.
 
In evaluating a problem that has the potential to gratuitously, rightly or wrongly, wipe out Mzansi’s inherited tertiary education structure, I wonder whether this thing of things has turned to haunt us. My ruminatory conclusion is that a pair of inherently unrelated “things”, are conflating: to bring down the house. To whit: Ill prepared wannabe tertiary learners and the democratization of corrupt practice.
 
Regarding the first proposition: Ill prepared learners.
 
As a long service contributor to the secondary education system it has long been held within the senior levels that the final results for the national senior certificate assessment are routinely adjusted [usually] upwards to communicate the impression that the ‘system’ is not as dark as it is painted and that a rising number of Children are achieving a university standard assessment. I admit that this is speculative and based on kolektive routine amazement that leaners who seemed and presented as, inept, unprepared and incompetent, routinely end up amongst the low end of the ‘winning entries’ [no offence intended to any so fortunate.]
 
Thus it was that I have long wondered wondered at a decision [presumably taken] to hugely and perhaps artificially inflate the final results for the 2013 high school year’s Senior Certificate assessment.
 
The figure jumped some 8 [eight] percentage points above the preceding year, which, notwithstanding the relevant minister claiming an “Eight percent” improvement was nonetheless in reality, in statistical language, closer to 14 Fourteen Percent. Either number was way outside the margin of error, or models of acceptable standard deviation, applicable to the measurement of relatively standardised and homogenous numbers and how they change over time.
 
It is undoubtedly a common occurrence to have successive school years or grades that are higher scoring than the preceding or following peers. So a fourteen percent improvement when viewed over say a fifty-year period would seem normal. When however, we review performance over a considerable and uniformly heterogeneous number drawn from the entire nation; and compare that result with the year preceding, then, in the absence of some considerable disruption, a movement of such magnitude is inherently suspect.
 
Nonetheless as we all know; for whatever reasons, no one official said anything to the contrary. The system ‘bought’ into the ‘development’, there was a national election pending, there were other more pressing issues of the day: than ’whingeing’ over the immense “success” of the new order. That was that and we all moved on. In fairness any demurrage would have been decried as an example of extreme political inappropriateness.
 
And thus it was, among other outcomes, that some 50,000 happy [albeit most fraudulently deluded] post -matriculants who, having ‘discovered’ that they had always been lied to, and that passing was a whole lot easier than everyone had always claimed, rushed to enroll in Tertiary, in a social media revolution driven militant wave that should already have had the eyebrows seriously raised.
 
For those unfamiliar with the usual process aspirant university entrants start planning and sending in reports from 11th grade, and the news media of the day were crammed, you may remember, with tales of administrative chaos: as a sea of new order millennials hit varsity in a wave that is cleansing out many a gloomy corner in its tumultuous passage.
 
Among other aspects of chaos an innocent mommy of one aspirant, was crushed to death, somehow in the maul that flooded unwary campuses. Multitudes who had mysteriously passed without much effort found themselves in a place where performance was all… and no one was playing games with outcomes. Thus their routine, embedded, standard, reflexive, procrastination model has yielded only rising un-payable debt and a terrifying wake up call to a reality that was instantly defined as deliberately and obfuscatingly complex.
 
Naturally this kolektion of happy under-ready persons, borrowed money at globally extortionate interest rates to go to the Uni’ of their dreams; assuming [reasonably] that their routine dilatory study habits were not the problem, for they were the same habits that got them through, so it was not that they had an intellectual problem with grasping the complexity of what they had chosen to study ….. The idea that the system had been rigged to their advantage was/is obviously both offensive, patronizing and also wrong enough for them to discover that their dreams had become nightmares.
 
The outcome is well known to those who follow events in obsessively parochial Mzansi. #Fees must fall, #all inconvenientlearningmustfall, #Universitiesmustfall
And to drive the message home ‘Burn baby burn’ as campuses in many quarters have seen artworks destroyed, libraries containing irreplaceable documents torched, entire science facilities razed to the ground, not to mention about two years of minimal learning; and skills development [the latter not strictly speaking, a university function… but rather one, recently imposed, through killing off the entire inherited alternative learning Technikons and similar institutions providing skills training.]
 
For skills you needed to go to a tech, or similar type of tertiary function designed to create a functional workforce. So we did away with all that and now you MUST go to Varsity. So we have masses of unemployable 20 something Arts graduates in such random fields as Biblical studies while we are short of plumbers, chefs, computer technicians, dental technicians, car mechanics, cabinetmakers, and toolmakers and so on, over pages of occupations… for whom no serious consideration has been given. When post are advertised, for instance by the local city council, one reads reports of applicants by the tens of thousands seeking to work as traffic cops, where ill- gotten ‘small payments’ are rumoured to be the bait: while ads for plumbers and electricians go unanswered.
 
People have literally died to get jobs as traffic cops and no one even knows that being an electrician in a country that must build at least ten million homes over a career lifetime would be a meal ticket for life: without the reasonable possibility of being shot dead by someone you pulled over for an offence.
 
Now the word is out. The exam results must be managed back down again. Last year’s [2015] results were down nearly 5 Percentage points on 2014, and there were some reports during the year from news aggregator services online, that the result was still 15 percentage points above the initial raw score recorded by the system before being “moderated”.
 
In the meantime the UNi’s are in some cases teetering on bankruptcy and even the most well off are taking a hammering. They have been prevented from raising their fees. The present government has apparently slashed their budgetary contributions, and a crashing economy is yielding a paucity of private benefactors. The kids don’t want to pay fees to study things that don’t understand.They have also become privy to the fact that the new elites are getting rich on democratised tax returns and thus comes the conflation.
 
The failure rate is apparently at all time record levels, one has heard figures of 90% under-competence levels being routinely reported in some quarters, and the international rankings of even the historically best universities are no longer anywhere near approximate of desirable. In other words they suck.
 
The mob, representing those who have been defrauded, and hence cheated out of their lives are righteously angry and absolutely no one in any form of authority is even starting to get to grips with what is a viral pandemic nightmare with no prospect of resolution. The relevant Minister of Higher education has ‘washed his hands’ apparently and put off “indefinitely” any consideration of what to do about the disastrous mess… which naturally can’t go away … until the Uni’s do.
 
And then having done that, and mindful that it was the President himself who elevated the government to central player in this years long tussle, last year, by unilaterally cancelling all fee increases for this year now in progress. The issue of the moment is whether the Uni’s can raise their fees for 2017. Decisions by the government were carefully withheld until breaks were over and the kids were on the home run to the exams and then the relevant Minister ducked completely and handed the responsibility for ‘increase decisions’ back to the Uni’s: successfully triggering off yet another anarchic wave of righteous indignation, burnage, rock throwing, teargas, molotov cocktails and stun grenades.
 
And so the entire “Pay back the money” idea takes a new turn as the students correctly argue that the money used for decades now for self enrichment shouold be theirs for a fee free education… and while i do have reservation on that with regard to University, i do bloggishly feel that the vocational sector should be released from the academic sector so that people can get skills that will be commercially useful and a price that facilitates national development.
 
And hence we have an insight into why it took thousands of years to recover our momentum when, as seems to be possible [and subject to further evidence] our entire evolutionary path was knocked of course… many thousands of years before we even began to now that learning was an arduous and contradictory journey.
 
The sheer weight of disillusion must inevitably break the system, and in the way of Gresham’s law* [Bad money drives out good] the empowered but powerless and vociferous majority must cancel out the potential of the tiny band of academic heroes.
 
And that is without throwing into the mix the growing disillusion with the way the fruits of the revolution have been allegedly appropriated by new elites intent on self-enrichment in place of fostering development and this is of course a problem regarding the perceptions of leadership in the country.
 
So the new ‘unspoken’ revolves around the knowledge from kolekted annual Auditor General reports. It is that the sheer scale of personal “Acquisition” over many years now would have comfortably funded free education at a range of tertiary levels, as it was once when it was heavily subsidized, without placing the pinnacle of the system at risk of disintegration.
 
So when rage conflates with disillusion a “comet” hits a planet’s comfortable existence; and the results, should care not prevail, could be a journey to a place that was not thought of when the word transformation became the new buzz term… but which has become the new normal for a range of other declining territories.
 
So what are the What if’s to this now overwhelming conundrum brought about by a simple failure to understand the dramatic difference between 8 percent and eight percentage points at a time when even point eight percent would have seen growing excellence being burnished and would have represented reality more closely. Notice that no one is sharing the secret of what to do, and the What if’s remain in the realm of fiction.
 
Perhaps that is why those ancients we knew no thing about, left us Pictographs at Gobekli Tepe, knowing we have issues with understanding.

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