Nurture the Geek Stars!

I had the great fortune to meet Rajendra Pawar, the founder of India's National Institute for Information Technology (NIIT) in Durban yesterday.

Rajendra is in South Africa as an advisor to Thabo Mbeki’s International Advisory Council on Information Society.

Rajendra has been instrumental in developing India's IT skills base to what it is today since founding NIIT 24 years ago.

He has since then expanded NIIT into other countries and has gained plenty of experience dealing with governments and helping to shape their policies to accelerate skills development with the same success as in India. Let's hope our government heeds his counsel!

The 2 topics at this year's panel were the high cost of broadband and our skills shortage crisis.

I spoke briefly with Rajendra about the foundation of 'Centres for Excellence' where talented students would be spoilt with extra attention and resources.

I believe that it's crucial that we establish schools for gifted children and identify kids from around the country at an early stage and give them a higher quality of education.

Of course it's not a very popular idea in South Africa at this stage. It would be seen as unfair for the state to single out smart children and treat them differently. Besides for egalitarian ideology, why spend extra resources on an 'elite' few, when we are struggling to even get textbooks to the majority of pupils?

Post WW2, similar thinking was pervasive in the US and discrimination based on a genetic factor such as intelligence was not something the state would engage in.

This changed very suddenly in 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik. Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce commented on the launch, referring to Sputnik's beeps as "an intercontinental outer-space raspberry to a decade of American pretensions that the American way of life was a gilt-edged guarantee of our national superiority."

Besides for an increase in scientific research funding, the foundation of DARPA and NASA, the school curricula were also dramatically overhauled.

Prestigious schools for gifted children were founded and smart kids were 'head-hunted' from schools around the country and given better teachers, more resources and advanced topics taught using new techniques.

Our schools will gladly identify top rugby players and athletes at a young age and send them on special training camps or provide scholarships to the top sports schools in the country.

Imagine we forced our best athletes to run only as fast as the average speed of the rest of the team in the run up to the Olympic games? Sounds bizarre, doesn't it?

However, this is exactly what we are doing with intellectually gifted kids in public schools. Although our sports stars will inspire school kids to give it their best and often promote South Africa as a brand overseas, it’s our ‘geekstars’ who will come up with cures for diseases, solutions for poverty, software that aids medication delivery and build businesses that will employ thousands and bring millions of Rands into the country.

Although South Africa is not in a Cold War with any other country, we are definitely at war with poverty and poor education. Let's start fighting!