(Previously in Transform SA Edition 33)
The future of our country lies with the youth, but a great portion of our country’s youth are jobless and idle, and some fell into drugs.
As we plunge into the fourth industrial revolution,there is so much potential and so much we can benefit from our youth. In spite of this, we are further away from greater opportunities as a result of the miseducation and backwardness of our educational institutions. We should have been milking the opportunities presented by the fourth industrial revolution to better our country and keep the youth employed but we are failing greatly as a society. It’s, unfortunately, a ticking time bomb now, and is either we adapt or we diminish. It’s time that South Africa’s rigid government and the public institution of higher learning get off their immovable high horses and make way for the in-demand skills. It is ironic that institutions whose sole and main mandate is to foresee the future and help proactively prepare for it are failing to educate the youth in line with where the world is going.
Universities and colleges are still enrolling learners to study in fields whose days are far left behind despite how clear it is the world has changed. Education is no longer just about learning facts and regurgitating them. We are in dire need of creative, data enthusiasts, and technology-obsessed thinkers. Our institutions of higher learning ought to reposition themselves to create educational environments encouraging the development of such thinkers, not people that are overly informed about irrelevant subjects. With skills in short supply and jobs going unfilled in fourth industry related fields, and skills over-supply in other fields, it’s time that tertiary institutions looked at training the youth for the reality that is outside their rigid walls. Today’s youth need relevant skills that can be applied in this real world, and not what the world used to be like.
