My grandfather died at a hospital in South Africa in 1997 after experiencing chest pain. Apparently, he went to reception, and they told him and my uncle to take a lift/elevator up to the ward, and he died in the lift. I was told afterward that it's a no-no to exert oneself during a heart attack. No idea if that's true or not.
Anyway, not second guessing OP, just putting it out there.
It sounds like a universal experience in high school is students not reading assigned literature.
In South Africa many of my now middle-aged HS friends, most of whom subsequently graduated university and have successful careers, used study guides for English literature (a handful would recycle essays from older siblings), and are proud that they have never read a fiction book.
English teachers and romantics like the author of this piece seem to place a lot of value in the teaching of literature, but the Common Core actually seems to be on the right track:
At the same time, in an effort to promote “college and career readiness,” the Common Core State Standards Initiative, launched in 2010 and currently implemented in forty-one states, recommends that students mainly read “informational texts” (nonfiction, journalism, speeches)
No point in pretending that the average student has the same hobbies/interests as their English-major teacher.
I was the dork who read every book assigned to me in English class, and proud of it. Of course, this stopped once I got to college. My CS course load meant that however much I enjoyed my humanities classes, the readings were the first thing that fell by the wayside. Still bums me out.
I read every book that was assigned to us, until grade 12, when we got something called "July's People" by Nadine Gordimer. Nobel Prize winner or not, she used literary techniques that were well beyond us, and we lacked teaching support.
I used to read novels well into adulthood, but family life eventually stopped that. I've tried audiobooks, but I tend to fall asleep or zone out, and haven't completed a novel in at least 10 years.
I don't know how pretending to read literature in later grades helped with reading, especially when the reading scores referenced in that article are assessed years before students hit that point.
The purpose of school is to prepare students to pass whatever selection filter top colleges and universities employ. Schools dropping literature means higher education institutions aren't admitting students on the basis of literature knowledge. No point in wasting time studying something if it's not going to help students pass tests.
That could be offset if we moved away from standardized tests. I think I would prefer verbal exams and vibe checks.
Of course, there's a reason we don't do this anymore. It's a weird trade off between "incentivizing studying for test" and "probability of discrimination". And the big point of the last century was decreasing the latter.
We'll never escape standardized testing. We have mass education involving hundreds of students per class as a matter of public policy. Tests are the only efficient way to assess students. Failing grades and general lack of performance can actually turn into political problems.
The best education is mastery education provided via long term one-on-one mentoring. Essentially the opposite of the current model. Only the rich can afford such services.
Same in South Africa...."mutton" usually refers to lamb. almost no one has a "lamb curry" or "lamb bunny" (Google it). It's "mutton curry" or a "mutton bunny".
My good friend from South Africa tells me how she and her husband miss cooking with mutton, which they find more flavorful and satisfying than lamb. What happens to the mutton-aged sheep here?”
Just to clarify: lamb is far more common in South Africa than mutton (aged sheep) and most people don't differentiate between the two. Maybe it's the flavour of the lamb that they're referring to that differs between the countries.
The term mutton is overloaded: in South Asia, I believe it refers goat.
It's interesting that the page says that Afrikaans was derived from Dutch in the 20th century, but the two languages are so different.
Dutch: Ik kan glas eten. Het doet geen pijn.
Afrikaans: Ek kan glas eet, dit maak my nie seer nie
The truth, of course, is that Afrikaans split off from Dutch centuries earlier, but it wasn't a "prestige language" until the 20th century.
The page comes from a more innocent time, when the internet hadn't hit critical mass, and you could get away with stuff like that without pedants fact-checking you to death.
There's not reliably one way to translate something, and there could be Dutch versions much closer to the one shown here in Afrikaans, such as: "dat doet mij niet zeer". Regardless, the Afrikaanse version is already very readable to my Dutch eyes. So much that its misleading about how close the languages really are, because as you say, they have well diverged, and while there's a lot of similarities, there's also plenty of space for native speakers of either language to miss the gist of what's being said in the other language.
The Afrikaans version may be comprehensible to a Dutch speaker, but the Dutch version, even the version you posted, is still very hard for this (second-language) Afrikaans reader to understand.
Oh it’s lovely though isn’t it? It’s like gravity, it seems inexorable. Being incorrect in front of enough eyes is a path towards correctness. Oft a painful one, but almost always informative.
It's rare to see an error in the opening sentence of an article, and maybe a nitpick but I believe "bushmen" usually refers to San hunter-gatherer nomads, not Bantu language-speaking pastoralists.
San is a derogatory word to describe them. In general it refers to several language groups that extend all the way from South Africa to Namibia and Botswana.
So is bushmen. Which does attempt to refer to the San people. It is also considered rude.
It depends on how it is used though. The San council in SA is ok with it’s use in positive contexts.
They have other names by which they refer to themselves.like !Kung. These represent their individual nations.
Himbas don’t have the same language or history as San/Bushmen. Also Himbas raise cattle .. So you are correct that the term “Himba bushmen” is very off. (Although I’m not familiar with Himba’s preferred names)
It’s a very western / German thing to talk like this with out knowing the full context and just assuming “hey they live in the bush lol bushmen”
Unless “bushmen” is being used in some generic “people who live out in the bush” sense? That stuck out to me too.
(I’m very closely connected to one of the foremost Western experts on the Himba and have spent time with them myself. Definitely not the same as the Bushmen.)
> I’m very closely connected to one of the foremost Western experts on the Himba and have spent time with them myself
This is such a strange sentence that makes it sound like they're some exotic, uncontacted people. Give it a couple of hours until its waking hours in Namibia, and we're going to have Himba people in this thread.
I’m not really sure what you mean. There are Himba people on the internet, of course. But there just aren’t that many of them in the world period, and there aren’t exactly a ton of non-Namibians who know any.
And I thought it was implied, but I was talking about Himba people who live traditionally, which sort falls under the “out in the bush” heading. Not too many of them hanging out on HN.
I can recall many, many years ago (20+), reading an article about the future of telephones. The article proposed that many developing nations would never install landlines with full penetration because mobile phones are so much cheaper. This was written in the era when mobile phones were still expensive. That blew me away.
This brings back bad memories, and illustrates the risk of linear thinking: South Africa's black population was denied proper services under apartheid, including telecommunications. In an effort to supposedly right that wrong, the state-owned telecommunications company, Telkom, was given a years-long monopoly on fixed-line telecommunications in return for putting in fixed line connections to black communities. There were reports that an American corporation, SBC, helped write the country's telecoms act after it acquired a minority stake in Telkom.[1][2]
That monopoly set South Africa back many years, and it's only been in the last decade that it began catching up with the rest of the world. Oh, and the copper network has been so badly looted that many/most places now have wireless landlines. And those under-served black people: they all bought cellphones for the same reasons that people in the rest of the world did.
South Africa is a deteriorating shithole. My mother was telling me that they want to move to guarded security estate because she is afraid she might be raped, and my father bludgeoned in their home. (NB: they’re not under threat because of their race, rather because that’s what criminals do).
The police are dumb as rocks and totally lazy: look at the Boksburg tanker blast in December to see how they don’t GAF about doing their jobs.the public was standing around a burning gas tanker taking pictures for social media for hours before it exploded and killed dozens. The police only pitched after the explosion.
There is no serious border control, and any mention of it is shut down as “xenophobic” by the media and business that want to flout labour regulations by hiring undocumented migrants from the rest of Africa, despite the obscene unemployment rate.
The electricity situation has been discussed at length here previously, but it’s strangling the economy.
Sure you can make money if you are skilled, but you can make better money using those skills in any number of other countries.
The only thing that’s keeping many middle-class South Africans from emigrating is the cheap domestic help. They are happy to exploit the obscene inequality since it gives them cheap labour. They live in terror of washing their own clothes and cleaning their own toilets.
In any case, apart from many Afrikaners, whites are increasingly irrelevant to the discussion about South Africa’s future-they’re dwindling as a percentage of the population because of aging, emigration, higher black birth rates and inward migration from other African counties.
>whites are increasingly irrelevant to the discussion about South Africa’s future-they’re dwindling as a percentage
Not true, the owners of the vast majority of SA land are still a tiny white minority. As long as this is the case, they are relevant.
>The country is, objectively, deteriorating.
The world's worst wealth inequality [0] will do that to a country until resolved. As I mentioned above, the transition will not be comfortable and anyone expecting it to be is wildly misinformed.
[0] "South Africa is the most economically unequal country in the world, according to the World Bank. The difference between wealthy and poor in South Africa has been increasing steadily since the end of apartheid in 1994, and this inequality is closely linked to racial divisions in society."
India and China have both managed to uplift their economies in the last 30 years without the “discomfort” of violent crime, increasing corruption, the collapse of state institutions and an inability to generate electricity.
Of course reducing everyone to grinding poverty is one way of reducing inequality, but it’s hard to see what the utility of that would be.
Blacks will, and do, bear the brunt of the deterioration anyway.
>India and China have both managed to uplift their economies in the last 30 years without the “discomfort” of violent crime, increasing corruption, the collapse of state institutions and an inability to generate electricity.
India didn't start out with massive amounts of inequality and is still working at building while dealing with a poverty crisis. It isnt close to the finish line.
China, the most successful at transitioning, had inequality comparable to South Africa at one point. That is precisely what Mao targeted when he came to power. Their effort, which involved redistribution of >90% of the land from tiny minority (<10%) ownership, stamping out corruption, and solving domestic production issues; could hardly be described as comfortable.
Foreign powers worked overtime to sabotage the Chinese effort like they have and will continue to do in South Africa as it gets started on this path away from economic apartheid.
The good news is, modern South Africa being a part of BRICS may be useful in reducing inequality more rapidly by employing wisdom gained by other members... but there will still be discomfort.
The history surrounding this kind of scenario is very clear and not as rosey as your description. Luckily SA is not resource poor and its allies are some of the most capable nation builders on the planet.
>Foreign powers worked overtime to sabotage the Chinese effort
>Mao’s reforms led to millions of deaths. China grew after the 70s.
Most of the deaths were due to trade embargoes set by western powers (mainly US & UK) that restricted emergency food and other imports leading up to and during an emerging famine.
Even though its an unpopular observation in the west, China's following 60 years of growth wouldve been stunted without Mao's decolonization efforts.
The government is bad for sure. But has SA ever not had a shitty government? Maybe briefly between 1994 to 2008. But it’s pretty nice to build my business here. The government sure as shit won’t be building the country up. Businesses will, and it’s happening.
Anyway, not second guessing OP, just putting it out there.