Is The African School For Excellence The Future Of Affordable Education?

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At The African School for Excellence in Tsakane, South Africa, the administration believes that each child thinks perfectly; that successful people are made, not born; that learning is social and emotional; that teachers are researchers of learning, not dispensers of knowledge; and that learning is best when it happens through discovery.

These core values are already enough to make any parent want to send their child to this institution of learning, but the ASE is much more than just a school: It’s also on the vanguard of redesigning how we view education, one opportunity at a time.

UPROXX sent Britt Ellis to learn more about the school and understand why ASE is more necessary now than ever. And the answers are staggering.

“About 20 percent of the government’s budget in South Africa is focused on education, it’s a priority” says Autumn Williams, executive director of the ASE Foundation. “But the reality is that it doesn’t mean equality or opportunity.” While most black South Africans attend these government schools, and despite the government’s budget, these students are not getting the education they need and deserve. That’s evidenced in literacy and mathematics scores, which put these students “far below the averages you see in other African countries that have the same economic statuses.” Tsakane, one of the poorest regions in South Africa was, before ASE, no different.

This disparity, explains Nonhlanhla Masina, co-founder of ASE, has everything to do with the dark history of resource distribution in the country. Due to this, even the quality of teaching in the schools is incredibly divided, with the black majority bearing the brunt of the inequality. And ASE wants to change that, not just in South Africa but any place on earth where children are denied quality learning experiences due to economic constraints.


“The reason we founded The Ase,” Masina tells UPROXX, “is because we believe every brain is like muscles. And we needed to figure out a system where your brain can come and develop to learn how to critically solve problems without being able to pay money you don’t have.”

So how much does ASE cost per student? $800 a year. Compare that to U.S. averages — $11,841 per year — and South Africa’s average costs, which range from $16,529 for elite private schools to $4,175 for historically white public schools to $1,444 for government schools, and you can see why the school is quickly gaining interest as it works to become a leader in education.

But cost is just one of the reasons why ASE is making so many waves. The school also uses an alternative model when it comes to instruction. Eschewing the idea that students learn best when sitting in rows and being taught from the front of the room, each class is separated into three parts, starting with a peer learning component that focuses on team work and allows students to learn from each other (something one student says is the only way for teenagers to learn), followed by time for each student to work independently and then a class dialogue, all overseen by a qualified (and quality) instructor and two learning assistants.

“In my previous school the teacher doesn’t care,” Khanyisilie Mkhetshane, an 11th-grader, told us, “but here at ASE we’re given a chance to think broadly about things. Not just to focus on things given to us, but to go deeper.”

The results speak for themselves: According to data, ASE’s students outperform the wealthiest students in South Africa by 2.3 times in math and 1.4 times in English. And the program is entirely scalable, meaning that there’s no reason that other school districts couldn’t take such a model and apply it to their own education system.

“We wanted to prove that this model could work in a resource controlled environment and resource-controlled environments around the world” says Williams. “If it can work in Tsakane, it can work in other places where there are a shortage of trained teachers, where there are infrastructure challenges, and where there are resource constraints due to capital.”

For more info on African School for Excellence, visit their website and follow them on Twitter.
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