Why We Won’t Transform Education By Perfecting the Machinery of
Compliance – but might by Activating our Humanity
Reflections from EdEco Connect
Dudu’s daughter overheard her mother say that math was a problem. Just that. A passing
comment, probably spoken in frustration or as simple self-reflection. But the child absorbed it
differently. She took on that language, internalized it, made it hers. Now, whenever math
gets hard, she brings it back: ‘Yeah, but mom, you weren’t good at math either. You always
say you didn’t like math.’
This is how math problems become hereditary. Not through genes, but through language.
Through stories we tell about ourselves that children overhear and make into their own
truths.
We’ve been talking about the math crisis in South Africa for decades now. Better curriculum.
More teacher training. Digital devices. Extra lessons. Saturday classes. We keep adding
interventions, stacking programs on top of programs, and still—the numbers don’t move the
way we want them to.
Maybe that’s because we’re trying to improve a system that was never designed to liberate
in the first place.
Colonial Education Did Not Fail
Let’s start with something uncomfortable. Colonial education did not fail accidentally. It
succeeded at its purpose.
It trained obedience. It separated people from place, from language, from culture, from each
other. It made knowledge a possession and made authority sacred. It created ranking
systems that told children, from the moment they walked into a classroom, who was worthy
and who was not.
So the question is not, ‘How do we improve that model?’
The question is: Do we have the courage to leave it?
Because here’s the thing—we will not transform education by improving a paradigm that was
designed to rank human beings. We will not get free by perfecting the machinery of
compliance. We need a different operating system.
And that operating system already exists. It’s called Ubuntu. It’s been here all along.
The Most Dangerous Sentence
The most dangerous sentence in education is not ‘you failed an exam.’
It’s the sentence that gets embedded in a child’s nervous system: ‘You are not enough.’
Deficit language is not neutral. Deficit language is a form of violence. It names people by
what they do not have, and it trains them to shrink themselves.
When we say ‘these learners lack,’ when we talk about ‘backlogs’ and ‘gaps’ and
‘disadvantaged communities,’ we are telling a story. And that story gets internalized. It
becomes the soundtrack playing in the background of a child’s mind while they’re trying to
solve for x.
Hope is crushed by deficit storytelling.
One teacher shared her experience working with intermediate phase teachers—people
training to teach mathematics who themselves lost math after Grade 9. They never saw a
science book after Grade 9. And now they’re standing in front of children, trying to teach
concepts they themselves fear or misunderstand.
She watched them teach back their lessons. The number of fundamental errors—not in
calculation, but in conceptual understanding—was staggering. And these teachers are
already in classrooms.
If we are not intentional about addressing teachers’ thinking, teachers’ misconceptions,
teachers’ gaps in knowledge—and they are already teaching—then we are not going to
change anything on the student side.
Teachers are our first learners. Their attitudes matter. Their hearts matter. Their belief
systems matter.
Hard Things Are Hard
There’s a story about when Obama passed the Affordable Care Act. Biden made him a little
plaque that sat on his desk. It said, simply: ‘Hard things are hard.’
It sounds trite. But there’s depth there.
Math is hard to fix. Not because we don’t have good programs or smart people or sufficient
research. It’s hard because we’re not dealing with just individuals or just a math problem.
We’re dealing with whole ecosystems. We’re dealing with inherited trauma, with language
barriers, with teachers who are themselves afraid, with children who come to school hungry,
with communities that have been told for generations that they lack.
If we think we’re going to come in and resolve this with just effective program execution,
we’re going to struggle.
But here’s the other side of that truth: hard things are the right kind of things for us to be
wrestling with. Because those are the things that ultimately give meaning and sense to our
lives.
We need to take into account that this is a large problem, but not
be overwhelmed by that. Be encouraged by it.
And we need to look for the levers that can actually shift paradigms, not just improve
metrics.
Head, Heart, Hand—and Heritage and Humanity
We talk about head, heart, and hand in education. The cognitive, the affective, the practical.
And they integrate, yes. But they still don’t include the other two H’s that are critical for
African mathematics education.
Heritage. We need to understand the heritage element of math in Africa. That we work as a
collective, we don’t work individually. We don’t compete as individuals—we compete with
each other to raise the whole tide. Ubuntu is the basis of African philosophy. It is being
human in relation to others. When education breaks relationship, it breaks the human.
Humanity. We are not working with calculators that need to be able to work with numbers.
We are working with whole human beings.
One participant spoke powerfully about mother tongue instruction: ‘Imagine at last where I
am taught by my language, talking to a teacher about the concept that I don’t understand,
expressing myself in my mother tongue. I can’t wait.’
Access to this language will never be a nightmare when children can learn in their fourth or
fifth language the same concepts being taught to others in their first. Heritage matters.
Language matters. Humanity matters.
It Takes a Maths Village
If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a maths village to raise a maths child.
The solution we are seeking for the maths problem of South Africa does not lie in the hands
of the maths teachers alone.
When a young girl comes home and says, ‘I failed my maths test,’ and her mother says
empathetically, ‘I understand. I also used to fail my maths’—that mother is as much a part of
the education of the child as any teacher. And in that moment, unintentionally, she’s making
the maths problem hereditary in the mind of the child.
Every conversation about maths with a child is critical. And before we even get to
conversations, we need to address fear. Fear of failure. Fear of looking stupid. Fear of
coming last.
Because if I have a fear of failure in my life, if I come from a place where everything seems
intimidating, and maths is presented as aspirational, illusory—only for those who are lucky or
privileged or gifted—then I’m immediately in a ranking system. And ranking crushes
possibility.
We need to declare war on ranking. We need to declare war on
competition that is extrinsically driven. We need to declare war on
the idea that peers can’t teach.
In a class of 83 children with one teacher, there are actually 84 teachers. The strongest
capacity only crystallizes when the teacher says, ‘My job is to activate the capacity of
children to love each other sufficiently to want to go back to the narrative of a hurt to one is a
hurt to all.’
This is the maths village. This is Ubuntu mathematics.
The Competition Trap
Someone shared a story about twin daughters. Both were in the top 5 of their maths class.
Both did well. Both got A’s. And both came out of school hating maths.
They lived with the horror of ‘maybe next term I’m not in the top 5.’ The anxiety was
constant. So competition is equally oppressive for the so-called successes.
In the statistics of our country, they are highly successful. But in the measures of who loves
maths and who understands that maths is an integrated element of our lives—they failed.
But we don’t measure that. We don’t measure joy. We don’t measure curiosity. We don’t
measure the capacity to see beauty in patterns or to feel wonder at the elegance of a proof.
From Functional to Flourishing
We need to shift the paradigm from ‘maths is for functional use when you leave school’ to
‘maths is for flourishing.’
There’s a beautiful book called ‘Mathematics for Human Flourishing.’ The author talks about
mathematics in terms of: exploration, meaning creation, playing, beauty, the appreciation of
beauty from seeing patterns, permanence, truth, struggle, power, justice, freedom,
community, and love.
Love.
Every human being has a relationship with mathematics. That relationship might be fraught
or joyful, painful or curious. But it exists. And we should be developing each child to
understand the gift of mathematical integration into their own lives.
Not just so they can pass matric. Not just so they can access certain careers. But because
mathematics is beautiful. Because it helps us see structure in the world. Because it gives us
tools to think clearly about complex things.
Because it can be a source of joy.
The Disavowal of Self
One of the most heartbreaking insights came when someone said: ‘Somehow, the message
has been sold that the child doesn’t have to see themselves as part of learning.’
There are two people operating. There’s the child outside the classroom—who has friends,
who engages as human. And then there’s the child inside the classroom—who is a machine
that has to produce results.
There’s an extraordinary disconnect. When you don’t see yourself in the picture, you are not
part of the learning. Learning is happening, and you happen to be there, by the way.
Children need to know that it’s primarily about them. Not about the results.
This self-alienation has happened over a long period of time, and it’s repeated and repeated.
Many teachers also don’t see themselves in the teaching. They don’t build relationships with
kids because they see their role as transferring data, downloading information.
But learners don’t care easily about the idea of maths—or any subject—if they don’t feel
cared for.
One teacher reflected on how long it takes to build a relationship with a new class, and how
hard it is to teach anything until you have that relationship. There are no shortcuts. There are
no hacks. It’s relationship, relationship, relationship.
Maslow Before Bloom
At LEAP Science and Maths Schools, they only offer core maths. Out of 3,600 children from
Diepsloot, Alexandra, Langa, Crossroads, Khayelitsha, and elsewhere, the expectation is: of
course we can do this. But we’re doing it together.
And it starts in Life Orientation class. Where they talk about why I can’t face failure, what I’m
afraid of, why I’m afraid of looking stupid. Because that’s as fundamental as any
mathematical concept.
Someone put it simply: Maslow before Bloom.
We learn when we know we are loved. And when we know that the love is unconditional.
This is not soft or peripheral. This is foundational. The shift from being disconnected or
unsafe to an embodiment of being feeling safe, connected, and worthy—that’s the interior
transformation that makes all other learning possible.
When the mindset of ‘I’m not enough’ and how it’s held in the nervous system is not
addressed, any interventions are like bandaging an infected wound. Relational repair is
critical in the process of re-establishing self-worth.
And this is a system structure and principle, not just a personal experience. It needs to be
the organizing logic of how we create educational spaces.
An Alternative Perspective
One voice brought a necessary counterpoint. A teacher who, thirty years ago, walked into
schools absolutely believing that every child can do maths. And now doesn’t believe that
anymore. And doesn’t mind.
Her argument: Can we care a little bit less about maths specifically? Because subjects, in
her view, are vehicles for teaching skills. The skill we want to develop through maths is
logical sequential reasoning. But you can develop that absolutely perfectly through robotics.
Through really good teaching of English literature essays. Through drama.
Because maths is a gateway subject, and because so many people have been excluded
from maths, we’ve become obsessed about it. But it’s not a gateway to everything. And we
also destroy children by obsessing about the fact that maths is all that.
This tension is important. The conversation isn’t about forcing every child through pure
maths. It’s about ensuring that no child who can do maths is left behind because of systemic
failures—while also creating space for alternative pathways that develop the same cognitive
capacities.
The key is not maths as subject. The key is maths as relationship, as way of thinking, as
expression of consciousness.
Learner Voice and Life Integration
At Ubuntu Maths Institute, they’ve learned through classroom observations and Life
Orientation conversations that when learner voice is heard, when the environment allows
and promotes learner voice, then learners start to believe in themselves. They start believing
the teacher. They believe they are loved.
And within such environments, learners tend to try.
Sustainable maths reform begins when teachers see themselves not as implementers of
policy, but as professionals capable of shaping change. When they see their role as not just
teaching maths, but as addressing teacher belief, agency, and professional identity.
One participant shared the connection between chores and mathematics learning—drawing
on research from China. Right now, learners go to school Monday to Sunday. There’s no
time for anything else. No chores. Nothing. All they do is school.
But what if mathematics learning happened through planting a veggie garden? Measuring
sports grounds? Cooking? Learning about water and power usage? Compound interest
through actual household budgets?
A Grade 2 teacher uses cooking and chores for data handling, and the children light up
when their chores are acknowledged at school. It makes school feel not completely
dislocated from home, from real life.
When we integrate mathematics into life, when we make school feel connected to home, we
change the entire experience of what it means to learn.
Paradigm Shift as Practice
Paradigm shift is easy to talk about as shifting the paradigms of the departments of
education. That’s not what it is.
Paradigm shift is me shifting.
And I don’t get to a destination. I simply begin a process. Which then makes paradigm shift a
practice rather than an outcome.
The people in these conversations cannot sit with some kind of moral superiority and say,
‘We get it, they don’t.’ We have to ask: Why are we not communicating this as well as we
should? What part of me is afraid? What part of me does not want to be ridiculed? What part
of me does not want to be called the outlier?
When I am an outlier in my thinking, I need to own that and realize that’s how paradigm
shifts—through early adoption. But if I become moralistic about those who haven’t shifted
and those who have, I revert to competition. I revert to oppression.
So it’s a practice. Every conversation is invitation. Every conversation says: Your story
matters as much as mine, and we need to find each other in those stories.
The purpose of holding space together over time is to grow our own courage to act. It’s not
enough just to experience and to know. We need to be held in space consistently and
congruently enough that we become brave enough to say: This is something I have to
embody wherever I am.
From Fear to Love
In systems predicated by fear, anxiety, and control, everyone—not just the learner—feels
alienated and afraid. The teachers. The parents. The learners. The communities.
The job we have is to shift ourselves into ways of being that are love, not fear based.
What does love-based mathematics education look like?
It looks like being intentional about the way we are being together. It looks like converting the
structures of our systems from fear, control, anxiety, and power to structures of love, care,
and belonging.
It’s possible. And being intentional about the way we are being together can change
everything. And can change it fast.
But it requires us to start on the inside. Not on the outside of the problem. On the inside of
the problem. And most of all, on the inside of me.
Once you’ve experienced the difference between a space that is based on
love and a space that is based on fear, you can’t unexperience it.
You can’t go into a fear-based space anymore and not say: I have a responsibility to show
up differently here. To offer a different experience.
This is the principle of diffusion. Diffusion is not scale, because scale is controlling. Diffusion
is gifting. And inviting. And being.
Decolonizing Mathematics Education
Real transformation requires decolonization at three levels:
Decolonizing the story. From ‘these children lack’ to ‘these children carry capacity.’ From
‘those communities are poor’ to ‘those communities are rich in assets, relationships, and
wisdom.’
Decolonizing the classroom. From ‘teacher delivers’ to ‘community learns and leads.’ From
competition to interdependence as intelligence.
Decolonizing the purpose. From producing labor for an economy, to producing citizens
with agency, conscience, and care. People capable of building an Earth for all.
This isn’t about adding Indigenous knowledge as a module. This is about fundamentally
reimagining what it means to teach and learn mathematics in African contexts.
The Invitation
At the end of the conversation, people were full. Cups running over. Saturated.
Someone said: ‘This has been my favorite EdEco ever.’
Not because there were easy answers. Not because anyone solved the mathematics crisis.
But because the conversation itself was an embodiment of something different.
It was a space of love, care, and belonging. It was a practice ground for the systems
principles we want to see in education. It was Ubuntu.
The foundational reformatting that is required is also the moment in time that we’re at.
Taking time to do deep examination and making choices toward ways of being that are
oriented toward love, care, and belonging—right at the base of our intent, in the heart space
of what we are doing.
Systemic, paradigm-shifting work requires spaces of love, care, and belonging so that we
can really sense into what needs to emerge, without replicating the mechanistic thinking that
has gotten us into this mess.
Let’s compost what no longer serves to make fertile soil for the
roots to shoot.
Maths improvement requires both structural design and human-centered design. Policies
and programs matter. But culture, belief, and community determine whether they live or
remain documents.
The conversation is less about maths as a subject than maths as an avenue into and an
expression of consciousness.
If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a maths village to raise a maths child. And
that village—we are building it. One conversation at a time. One relationship at a time. One
paradigm shift at a time.
Inside out. Much more sustainable.
We will not transform education by improving a paradigm
that was designed to rank human beings.
EdEco Connect is a space for connection, support, refreshment, and thinking
partnership between diverse education actors across the South African learning
ecosystem. Our goal is to strengthen and support each participant for their own
work, and to provide a community of care and growing insight supporting our
individual and collective responsiveness to the evolving needs of the South African learning landscape.
