 To shed some light on how successful OBE might be in benefiting all South Africa's learners, we asked John Gueltig, the editor of the series of modules, to talk to Carola Steinberg, whom we met in part two of this audio tape. And we've moved towards an outcomes-based curriculum now. Does this mean that we're going to have a more equal society? Will this new curriculum serve people equally? The intention, of course, is yes. In reality, though, there is more than simply a policy document of curriculum. There are different contexts in which people teach and in which schools operate. Let's take an example. We've got a child who lives in a squatter camp somewhere, in a formal settlement, goes to the local school, and you've got somebody who goes to Poctine Boys High, who will experience the curriculum differently. An expensive private school will have more equipment, will have more books, will have a better stocked library. Also, a more expensive school will have better qualified teachers, and teachers that have more subject knowledge than a school in a squatter camp, because they can afford to pay for more highly qualified people. There will be a huge difference. I've heard many stories of kids going to the same school. So let's say girls and boys going to exactly the same school, and yet they perform very differently, and not just one girl or one boy, but it seems like they're actually getting a different curriculum. What's happening in situations like that? That was one of Bernstein's big questions. Bernstein himself was a working-class person that had gone through the system, became a teacher, was very keen on working-class children making it, and then saw that the working-class children weren't. And he knew from his own experience that it wasn't the children's fault. What was the cause? He then went to university and spent many years researching that question. What is it that makes children from working-class backgrounds seem to benefit less from what school is offering compared to children that come from more privileged backgrounds? What was his answer? I think he had many answers. But one of the answers that he gave was that children with working-class backgrounds come to school with different skills and different ways of viewing knowledge, and they are less able to hear and relate to and work with what the teachers are saying because they're coming with different expectations and with different understandings of knowledge. Working-class kids come in and they are confronted with a kind of knowledge that is not familiar to them. And so they start off school with a disadvantage because school doesn't reach out to them and make an effort to make that academic knowledge familiar to them. School isn't geared for that. What do we mean by academic knowledge? And what my understanding of what academic knowledge does is it helps people to structure thought, it makes things more abstract, more in terms of systems, it places a lot of emphasis on logical progression and less emphasis on anecdote or immediate life. If one comes to an area of knowledge without there being some kind of mediation of those concepts of those shortcuts of that vocabulary that is being used in that field, then you can listen to that conversation as much as you want. You won't understand it because you don't have the pre-knowledge. Why would middle-class kids be able to handle that sort of knowledge? Because middle-class kids get a lot of the preparation for that from their home. Why? In what ways? Because their parents have that kind of knowledge in their heads and so they spend a lot of time teaching the children. Just through everyday conversations? Through conversations, through puzzles, through games, I mean- Through having books? Simply, for that matter, from reading to with three books to your child every night before it goes to sleep. And a lot of middle-class families start that when the kid is like a year old. So that by the time the child reaches school, it has heard many stories. It has seen many pictures. It has probably learned to read simple things itself already, whereas a working-class child will come from a family where they know books or where there's only the Bible, which is not very accessible to a child. They have to start the process of reading from the beginning. So they're starting, in a way, with a disadvantage. And the school doesn't pick that up. How should schools address that? If you have a majority of children that don't fit the curriculum that you're expecting, then of course you must change the curriculum to suit the children. Because always the children are more important than a curriculum. One way a teacher can do that is to use examples from the children's own lives as the content through which she teaches the skills that she wants to teach. Because a teacher is trying to teach skills. You're trying to teach people how to read, how to do mathematics, how to structure your thought in a logical, coherent way. But you can choose lots of different kinds of content in order to do that. So if you're in a rural village and say you wanted to teach reading, you can choose texts and stories that come out of the culture of those children. So that when they're learning to read, they're interested in the stories, they can relate to the stories, and their focus is on learning to read. And they immediately see the purpose and the value of reading, because it gives them access to stories that they love. You wouldn't, in a rural context, choose stories about children playing computer games or American space research, because the children wouldn't be able to relate to that. So you would choose content that is appropriate to your children. Don't you run the danger then of permanently marginalising working class kids? I mean, surely in the world in which we live, you require a lot of that academic knowledge. You require the sort of general abstract principles of maths or a whole lot of other things in order to work or certainly to be successful. I mean, you don't need it to work as a cleaner somewhere. So isn't the danger that you, what actually happens is that working class kids will remain working class forever if you give them just that concrete knowledge, just the stuff from their particular village or their community? Absolutely, yes, that is the danger. So what one needs to do as a teacher is to use the everyday knowledge to scaffold children into the more abstract, more academic knowledge. Okay, when children have read five stories about their own village, well then they're absolutely ready to start reading stories about America or Asia or other places in the world to start improving their general knowledge. The danger of taking only from the context of the children is that you ghettoise them. You don't give them access to the broader world and you don't give them access to how other people are thinking.