CRITICAL analysis regarding youth unemployment within the current South African educational context.

 

The South African context is faced with a lot crises, including unsustainable development, social, economic and political context of high youth unemployment, energy crisis and Covid-19 crisis, and the shortage of 21st century and 4IR skills. Unsustainable development is about the exploitation of resources, present progress may be at the expense of the future generation, one may be on climate change. One may ask how does climate change affect the learners at school? A huge number South African school learners depend on food provided to them at school, long change in weather patterns my affect the production of food leading to learners not having enough food. The same group of learners were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic due to the lack of technology devices which would have given them access to online learning, but instead, they were required to stay at home. The energy crises in South Africa just makes everything else worse, this makes the usage of technology in the classrooms more difficult. Now another huge crises we face is having a youth that lacks 21st and 4IR skills which then leads to youth unemployment. The main focus is not only on developing the learners with skills, 4IR skills, but developing them with skills they will need in the near and far future because what will happen when we move to next industrial revolution? Now the question to ask yourself is that, is the educational system really inclusive when it comes to developing the learner's skills? are all the skills that needs to be acquired assessed? If you take a close look, there is a huge gap between high school and higher institutions in terms of skills development, learners in their high school level hardly engage in activities that aims at developing skills for the future, most high school teaching is mainly focused on having the learners to gain content knowledge and nothing else. So, when the learners get to higher institutions, they get assessed on their skills, this becomes something new to them and they have to adapt, which is not an easy thing to do.

A UJ student was also interviewed to give their opinion based on youth unemployment and how they feel thinking that they may be part of the unemployed youth after graduating. This was the response:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1baOdqElje7F9HXpIm-6CoDSHZWt1AtmxxrMDR9qltfE/edit?usp=sharing
 

The following videos focuses on the crisis of youth unemployment in South Africa:

 

                                                                                                                                         

Reference

eNCA. (2022, October). Discussion | Learning beyond qualifications [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgcZ0JXMLzo. 

SABC News. (2021). SA skills capacity | What do young people need to learn in order to be employed - Part 1 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-2pxb1CFns.