Critical South Africa Debates by Bryan Britton - HTML preview

EDUCATION

Stepping Stones: Chapter on Education

Bryan Britton

October 2012

In the introduction to this book we quoted John Ruskin, British social commentator (1819-1900) as saying: “Let us reform our schools and we shall find little reform necessary in our prisons”. Unless you have been on an extended visit to Mars you will know that both of these institutions are under severe pressure in the not-so-new South Africa.

The prisons are overflowing. The justice system cannot cope. Offenders enjoy benign bail conditions because there is no room at the inn. This allows them to become repeat offenders without even being incarcerated. Our South African lives, Black, White, Colored and Asian are worth less than a cell phone. Is this the life God planned for us? Do we ordinary South African citizens, Black, White, Colored and Asian, deserve this?

I think not.

In a report on education, Jonathan Jansen recently said in a national newspaper: “A five-minute walk through the school and all South Africa’s education problems are on display. The roof is rusted throughout; the toilets stink; litter is everywhere; one teacher is dozing inside a noisy class; and a number of children can be found drifting on a playground.

On to the next school and things get worse. Children are outside washing the cars of their teachers, and a number of adults occupy the school grounds, selling their wares. The school is literally falling apart, with huge holes in the ceiling of the room in which I am to speak. By the time we get to the final school the pattern is familiar; filthy grounds, lack-lustre teachers, crumbling infrastructure and poor results”. As ordinary South African citizens, Black, White, Colored and Asian, should we accept this appalling excuse for the education of our precious youth?

I think not.

A 15-month study of township youths’ morality has concluded that most of them are good kids, but many are neglected. Adult guidance is what is missing from their part-schooled, part-parented lives. Sharlene Swartz, a fellow at the Human Sciences Research Council conducted the research at a school in Cape Town amongst pupils aged between 15 and 19 years. Swartz believes the moral makeup of township youth needs to be the focus of educational attention, and has called for innovative interventions by policy makers and educators.

Skollie Vuma, when interviewed in the study on his take on corruption, said: “If apartheid didn’t affect my parents, then maybe we wouldn’t be staying in that shack house… maybe if my parents were staying in the suburbs, I wouldn’t know about those things (drinking, drugs and criminal behaviour) and I wouldn’t see so many people smoking dagga”.

Can you argue with that lost young South African’s view Young Vuma’s plight is borne out by a recent survey, says Servaas van der Berg of the Department of Economics at Stellenbosch University. An analysis of the earnings of employed matriculants aged 20 to 24 showed that those from households headed by a parent without matric earned on average R2,262 per month, while households with a matriculated head earned on average R4,512 per month. The correlation between education and relative poverty is plainly evident in this small sample.

Unisa’s Bureau of Market Research in their report on personal income patterns and profiles says that there is a strong correlation between education and income levels. Adults with no schooling earn R50,000 per year or less, while incomes between R300,000 and R500,000 per annum were earned by people with a secondary or tertiary qualification.

The survey further notes that South Africa ranked last among 45 countries in 2006 in terms of literacy and mathematics. Further, one white child in 10 and one black child in 1,000 achieves an A aggregate matriculation.

How, in good conscience, are we as a country able to dream of an African Renaissance and spend billions of taxpayers’ funds pursuing this frivolous ideal, when we are last in the class?

The Cape-based Centre for Higher Education and Transformation, together with the University of the Western Cape’s Further Education and Training Institute, in their Ford Foundation funded research, found recently that nearly three million of South Africa’s 6,7 million youngsters between ages 18 to 24 were, in 2007, neither employed nor receiving any form of post-matric training or higher education. Of this idle population 41 percent are Coloured and 44 percent are African.

The state of play 15 years into the not-so-new South Africa may be seen from the 2009 matriculation results, as reported by the Centre for Education Policy Development:

1998 GENERATION OF SCHOLARS

     NUMBERS                 PERCENT

South Africa is recognised as one of the biggest spenders on education in the world, forking out about five percent of Gross Domestic Product. Despite this, it remains one of the poorest achievers by international standards. How can we, as a nation, possibly tolerate a drop-out rate of 64 percent? This is far worse than the 39 percent fail rate for those who actually wrote the matric exam in 2009? Education expert, Graeme Bloch, says: “It’s a ticking time bomb. An enormous number of children will not be doing very much with their lives and will probably not get a second chance at basic education”.

How the poor South African economy has continually absorbed these horrific numbers of lost children each year, over the last 15 years, is indeed a miracle. Certainly, this aggregate of lost children is growing to become a very significant portion of the Rainbow Nation.

Graeme Bloch continues: “It will take about 30 years to fix this problem. By then the dropouts from the 1998 generation will have been unemployed for most of their adult lives”.

Veteran journalist, Allister Sparks, further highlights this debacle: “We have betrayed a whole generation of young people and left more than a million of them with no prospects for the future. That is failing in a sacred  responsibility that the ANC had to the youth of this country. For it was the youth, more than anyone else, who fought the real war of liberation in this country.

They represent the future, and to fail them is to ensure the failure of the future of South Africa.

A subject so grave it must surely top the ‘to do list’ of the President. Alas no. He gives credence instead to the notoriously retrogressive SA Democratic Teachers’ Union (SADTU) backed by that ever grasping dalliance partner, Cosatu. Over the past five years SADTU has the dubious distinction of topping the list of days lost through strike action. Of all working days lost in this period, 42 percent were incurred by our infamous teachers’ union.

Andrew Levy, veteran labour specialist, says: “We hope one day teachers will realise their moral obligation and use strikes responsibly”. Servaas van den Berg, Professor of Economics at Stellenbosch University, adds: “Strike action puts at risk the chances of children getting a good education”. And economist Mike Schussler goes as far as saying: “SADTU is keeping apartheid alive”.

So, let me try to understand. The future of South Africa lies in the hands of the youth of the nation. The key to that event lies in the education of that youth. The success of that endeavour depends on teachers being at school to teach and having the moral obligation and incentive to teach. And finally, the government having the will to prioritize education above all else. That scenario seems too simple. Perhaps those entrusted to execute these plans have a greedier and more devilish agenda?

And as Rome continued to burn, the modern-day Nero and his merry fiddlers continued to fiddle-late into the night.

Against this highly untenable background we, as a government, happily allow more than two million foreign work seekers to enter our job market. Are we as a country crazy or is it just that too many favorite nephews and nephews have leap-frogged the education process and now form part of the moronic elite that makes uninformed decisions, whilst chomping happily at the trough.

The number of members of the lost generation grows annually and by the time we have achieved the African Renaissance Agenda of Gaddaffi, Mbeki, Zuma and Mugabe, the population of Neanderthals that these gentlemen would have created in their quest, won’t give a rat’s arse.

This is but the tip of the iceberg. We must anticipate that future leaders, Parliamentarians, mayors, councillors, ministers and indeed a president, must evolve from this morass.

It matters little who is to blame. What matters is that this is unfortunately the de facto situation. Of more importance is-who will rise to the challenge of fixing the problem? The future of South Africa will be in the hands of the youth of today. If we, the elders of this country, do not intervene and help these young citizens to meet their future democratic obligations, then, in the words of our nation’s moral beacon, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, “We are for the birds and our nation will self-destruct

DA: Gavin Davis says why is SADTU afraid of accountability?

16 Feb 2017

DA Leader Mmusi Maimane’s announcement last week that the DA will introduce a national education inspectorate has SADTU bosses running scared.

The SADTU General Secretary’s hysterical response to the idea of a national inspectorate is to be expected from a union whose greatest fear is being held to account for the destruction it has wrought in our education system.

The fact is that SADTU bosses have been allowed to operate with impunity for too long. The ANC government has allowed the SADTU leadership to capture our education system for its own nefarious purposes.

The Ministerial Task Team on the ‘Jobs for Cash’ scandal found that SADTU is at the apex of a national network of bribery and corruption involving the buying and selling of educator posts. It found that SADTU does this by deploying its cadres into provincial governments and that SADTU is in de facto control of 6 of the 9 provincial education departments.

SADTU’s dominance is a key reason why our education system is failing in poor, mainly rural provinces. Weak educators are shielded from being held to account for failing our children, and teachers are actively encouraged to stay away from schools as we saw in Limpopo a few weeks ago.

This is why SADTU is afraid of a national education inspectorate. It is scared that this inspectorate will fully reveal the extent of SADTU’s culpability in our failing education system. It is afraid that the balance of power will shift away from corrupt union bosses and towards the children of our country.

It is time to restore balance in our education system by holding those who fail our children to account. We must celebrate the thousands of capable and dedicated teachers both inside and outside of SADTU. But we must make sure, at all times, that the children of our country receive the educational opportunities guaranteed in our Constitution.

 What “decolonized education” should and shouldn’t mean

February 14, 2017

Brenda Wingfield

Vice President of the Academy of Science of South Africa and DST-NRF SARChI chair in Fungal Genomics, Professor of Genetics, University of Pretoria

University students in very different countries – South Africa, England and the US – argue that it’s time to decolonize higher education. What does this mean? What would acquiescing to the students’ push mean for research, science and academic collaboration?

First it’s necessary to understand those two words: “decolonization” and “education”. The Cambridge dictionary calls decolonization “the process in which a country that was previously a colony controlled by another country becomes politically independent”.

“Education”, meanwhile, is what the Oxford dictionary calls “the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university”.

Placed together, then, the decolonization of education means that a nation must become independent with regards to the acquisition of knowledge skills, values, beliefs and habits. This makes a lot of sense. It’s surely what any nation should be doing. But I would argue that the term is being badly misinterpreted among South African students. As one student at the University of Cape Town has explained it:

For decolonised education to be introduced, the existing system must be overthrown and the people it’s supposed to serve must define it for themselves.

This is not an isolated view espoused by an individual.

These are very dangerous ideas. What’s really important is that South African teachers, lecturers and professors must develop curricula that build on the best knowledge skills, values, beliefs and habits from around the world. These cannot be limited to one country nor one continent – be it Africa or Europe.

And while it may surprise many calling for “decolonized education”, South Africa’s universities are not ivory towers: they are hotbeds of research solutions for the nation, drawing on local and global theories, thinkers and science. Much of this work could be undone if students push their thinking about “decolonized education” into practice.

Good science transcends geography

Most of the research done at South Africa’s universities and by its research councils focus on South African and African questions. The National Research Foundation (NRF) which funds most of the active university researchers in the country has as its object of foundation:

…to support and promote research through funding, human resource development and the provision of the necessary research facilities in order to facilitate the creation of knowledge, innovation and development in all fields of science and technology, including indigenous knowledge and thereby to contribute to the improvement of the quality of life of all the people of the Republic.

The first six centres of excellence funded by the country’s Department of Science and Technology focused on tuberculosis, biodiversity, invasion biology, tree health, catalysis and strong material. These are all important areas of research for South Africa. Likewise, the Square Kilometer Array is a project which, while funded nationally and internationally, will result in the training of a generation of new knowledge workers – young scientists and engineers. Many of these will be South African and benefit the local economy hugely.

Most of the successful researchers in South Africa I know are dependent on research funding from a local industry. This research helps South African industries to solve problems and is an essential part of their success. These industries employ the citizens of South Africa.

My own research programme is a good example. I collaborate nationally and internationally. I use cutting edge technology and the most recent knowledge from top science journals to study organisms which are of local relevance. I sequenced the first fungal genome in Africa by Africans. I could have done this by outsourcing to technology platforms off the continent, but I didn’t.

As a consequence the University of Pretoria, where I hold a South African Research Chairs Initiative (SARChI) position has an internationally competitive research programme on genomics. Our focus is on locally important organisms, but we use the best techniques and methods developed internationally to achieve our research goals. The field is a fast moving one and there are new developments published every day. We need to keep up with what’s happening internationally but also be publishing our own research in the international arena.

Our work in the Forestry and Agricultural Biotechnology Institute isn’t unique. Thousands of researchers around South Africa are using a combination of local skills, local knowledge, global knowledge and technology from different worlds, whether in Africa or elsewhere. It’s only by “standing on the shoulders of giants” that, as 12th century theologian John of Salisbury put it, “We can see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature”.

Balance is crucial

The risk of adopting student protesters’ stance on “decolonizing education” is that South Africa rejects all the advances of modern medicine, education and science that originated elsewhere in the world.

This would, for example, mean rejecting the use of penicillin, the yellow fever vaccination and HIV ART drugs. None of these were developed in Africa.

If we isolate ourselves, knowledge wise, South Africa’s own amazing advances would be lost to the rest of the world. Other countries are happy to benefit from our discoveries. We should continue to benefit from their discoveries, too.

I’m not suggesting that South African students shouldn’t learn about their own country, continent and the remarkable work that’s being done by African researchers for African nations. But they should also be learning about advances and theories developed in the rest of the world.

This is already happening in places: Life Science departments at the University of Pretoria, for instance, boasts a curriculum that performs this epistemological balancing act. Students use the best textbooks available. The information in these books is then supplemented with local knowledge and context. Students are taught about DNA and heredity, which is international, but then they learn about the biodiversity of African plants, birds and mammals.

They learn about the organisms that are models internationally for the study of genetics – Yeast, Drosophila, Neurospora and Arabidopsis; they also learn about the research that’s being done at the university and elsewhere in South Africa to solve local problems.

The challenge for tertiary educations in South Africa is to ensure that the curriculum presented is based on international best practice. We cannot limit the knowledge base of South Africa’s next generations to only regional knowledge and culture. This would be tantamount to “throwing the baby out with the bathwater”. We must however, be locally relevant and celebrate the research and researchers in South Africa.

My hope for South Africa is that in some cases we will lead internationally that “best practice”; in some cases we already do

From California, Prof Jansen frets SA now “living in the age of unreason.”

Respected South African academic leader Prof Jonathan Jansen has been away from the media spotlight for a while, reflecting as a fellow at one of his alma maters, ivy league Stanford University in California. Jansen earned his PhD at the famous US institution a quarter century back. Leading American journalist Barry Wood travelled to Stanford to meet with Jansen and discovered the Prof’s time away from home hasn’t changed his forthright opinions. The former vice chancellor and rector of Free State University concludes that because of mismanagement by its leadership “UCT is essentially destroyed“. And he frets that a growing crisis in SA’s education sector portends a grim future for the country. As he might well have reminded the country: if you thought education was expensive, try ignorance. – Alec Hogg

By Barry D. Wood*

PALO ALTO, CA:  Jonathan Jansen was in a sombre mood when we met on a fresh January morning at Stanford University’s Centre for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. Jansen is a fellow at the prestigious institute nestled among the pines and eucalyptuses in the Santa Cruz foothills that overlook the campus.

A prolific and fast writer, Jansen is completing three books during his sojourn in California. His writing cottage opens onto a planked deck where, between the trees, there’s a magnificent view of Palo Alto and San Francisco Bay.

Barry Wood

Tranquility is interrupted only by occasional conversations with other scholars who abide by the institute’s sole requirement that they show up daily for lunch.

Asked about the turmoil at SA universities, Jansen stuns his interlocutor by asserting that, “UCT is essentially destroyed.”

The former vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State has no time for what he calls the small group of anarchists who led the #RhodesMustFall campaign. Their misguided protest, he says, gained traction because of the liberal appeasement and white guilt that is pervasive among many UCT faculty. Their ambivalence about allowing police on campus to restore order and respect the rights of the majority, he says, put Vice-chancellor Max Price in an untenable situation. UCT is Africa’s oldest, most prestigious university.

As readers of his newspaper columns know full well, Jansen is fiercely critical of the lack of standards in SA’s largely dysfunctional primary and secondary government schools. Students who do matriculate, he complains, often lack analytical skills and are ill prepared for university study. This deficit is reflected in their high dropout rate from universities.

The biggest culprit, Jansen argues, was the apartheid government’s closure of mission schools, a consequence of the 1953 Bantu Education Act that downgraded African schools, putting the professions off limits and educating the majority only for menial tasks.

Zimbabwe stands above SA in basic education – particularly in science and maths, he says, because its mission schools remained open throughout the years of anti-colonial struggle.

Black students at UCT, he says, comprise an elite group but they are often conflicted by guilt. “They are a minority within the student body and a minority in the western Cape, where tens of thousands of their brethren in Langa and Guguletu are living in poverty.”

Jansen believes the #RhodesMustFall campaign began with good intentions before descending into anarchy and violence. Most students and staff were intimated and retreated into silence. Lacking an analytical foundation, when challenged the instigators fell back on anger as legitimate demands became a violent insistence on decolonization.

An activist in the anti-apartheid struggle and conversant with the 1950s Marxist rhetoric of Frantz Fanon, Jansen dismisses the suggestion that Fanon’s teachings on violence have relevance in today’s SA. The protestors, he says, are misusing Fanon’s language of de-colonization. Today’s students, he fears, are not being prepared for a globalized world and the old analytics of us versus them no longer apply.

Jansen worries about a growing mood of intolerance within SA. He sees the Zuma government as impotent in the face of a violent minority of student protestors. But he concedes that by gradually reducing university funding it hastens the demise of higher education.

“We are living,” says Jansen, “in an age of unreason.”

The books Jansen is preparing at Stanford include As By Fire, a study of the student protest movement and how it contributes to the end of the SA university. A second book, Making Love in a War Zone concerns interracial intimacy in the conservative Free State, and the third is about the Western Cape where he grew up. It is a counter-narrative to the literary images of mothers in the Cape Flats as vulgar, vain and victims.

Asked about the future of Afrikaans, Jansen says its inescapable association with apartheid renders it unacceptable to most blacks. It is only a matter of time, he says, before it is abandoned as a language of instruction at Stellenbosch University.

Jansen’s future is unclear although he plans to return to SA. Last August, after seven years on the job, he resigned from University of the Free State.