A few years ago, their dreams were shattered by poverty, crime and a dysfunctional school system.
“Life was over before it had really started,” says Gerald Maarman (25). “I felt like a complete failure,” adds Bongiwe Tyhala (26). “I was preparing for unemployment or some desperate job like cleaning floors,” says Pumza Ghu (25).
But they, together with a program that’s been branded one of the most progressive ever in South African tertiary education, transformed their destinies. From being failures at mathematics and science, Tyhala, Ghu and Maarman are now on their way to becoming seasoned medical health professionals.
Tyhala and Ghu are medical interns, while Maarman is a medical physiologist researching the effects of new drugs on the human body. “To say they’ve overcome incredible challenges is putting it very, very modestly,” says Nokwanda Siyengo, manager of the SciMatus program at Stellenbosch University in South Africa’s Western Cape province.
Ghu went to school in the Eastern Cape, one of the country’s poorest provinces. “There’s no schools there. If there’s schools, then there’s no teachers. If there’s teachers, there’s no textbooks (and) pieces of chalk,” she reflects. Ghu says her high school mathematics and science teacher was “always absent. We (pupils) had the responsibility of doing things for ourselves and no one was really guiding us. We kind of didn’t know if we were doing the right thing.”
Under these circumstances, Ghu says she “lost the love” she’d always had for the subjects.
Maarman also went to a school where pupils had to share textbooks and teachers lacked skill, but he says these were “minor” problems in comparison to others plaguing the institution. His school was on the Cape Flats outside Cape Town, an area notorious for gang- and drug-related violence. “Sometimes the school would just shut because the gangsters nearby were going crazy, shooting and everything,” says Maarman.
His and Ghu’s education was constantly disrupted by pupils and teachers boycotting the schools to protest the terrible conditions. “You were forced to join the boycott,” says Ghu. “If you showed in any way that you were opposed to the boycott, you could be a victim of violence at any time.”
Tyhala, who had been “excellent” at mathematics and science in the early years of high school, says she later “lost all powers of concentration” as a result of “personal problems.” She lived in Langa, an impoverished township near Cape Town.
These circumstances conspired to ensure that the three youngsters failed mathematics and science in their final exams. They couldn’t go to university. Realizing that the education system had failed him, Maarman reacted with “furious rebellion” that he says almost “derailed” him.
“Especially when I realized that my dream (of going to university), is now going to die, I was angry because I felt like school is the place where they’re supposed to teach you how to think. And they did exactly the opposite,” he states, before smiling broadly and adding, “But SciMatus was my light.”
The Scimatus program recruits students who may have failed mathematics and science but who had previously showed potential in the disciplines. “We believe these students to be very clever people who have been stymied largely by a crisis-wracked schooling system,” explains Dr. Kosie Smit, SciMatus director. “We believe they deserve a second chance, so we give it to them.”
To do so, they employ some of the province’s best mathematics and science teachers. During a rigorous year, they instruct the Scimatus recruits – about 70 of them – in mathematics and science from South African school grades 10 to 12. “It’s three years of work packed into just one year, so it’s extremely grueling,” says Siyengo. But some recruits – like Tyhala, Ghu and Maarman – achieve the high marks necessary to enter university, and their tertiary studies are sponsored by the program.
Smit’s convinced that most SciMatus recruits succeed because – unlike in most South African schools – highly skilled teachers show them individual attention and teach them “critical thinking.”
Says Maarman, “When I went to SciMatus, they changed my thinking pattern by explaining to me how maths works, how science works, how you approach science, how you approach a problem. SciMatus…caused a paradigm shift in the way I was thinking.”