The state of our educational system is the greatest
obstacle in the way of a prosperous, equitable future for all South Africans.
The ratio 5000:25000 is one frequently quoted. There are
25 000 schools in South Africa and research has shown that only 5 000 of them
are functional. Of those about 1 000 produce 95% plus pass rates and enrich
their learners by way of extra-curricular activities, including community
service, sport and cultural activities.
There a variety of reasons for this situation and the
main one is that decades of apartheid education intentionally saw to it that
the majority of our schools should be inferior. One of the tools used was to
create a funding chasm between the schools in the townships and those in the
white suburbs – an apartheid educational geography. The legacy of that planning still
persists.
The 1000-odd functioning schools are found mainly in the
former white suburban areas and most, though not all, of the dysfunctional ones
are in the locations.
No child should be condemned to an inferior education
because of where they were born and where they live, Gauteng MEC for education
Panyaza Lesufi has said more than once, and he is absolutely right.
He has also said that apartheid was man-made and non-racialism should be
man-made, and that the poor deserve good education so they can get out of
poverty. We need to have one education system. Spot on, again. But what is he going to do about it? And what has the government
done about it in the 25 years that it has had control of the national purse,
and the ability to make laws?
Remember too that
corporate South Africa has long realised the need to fix education and has
thrown billions at the problem. Corporate social investment spending in
South Africa totalled R6.8 billion in 2016, of which some 48% was channelled
into educational projects. That’s more than R2.3 billion, in one year alone.
There is
more money spent on education that on just about any other single issue, yet we
find ourselves worse off that ever before. And if you are wondering how bad it
really is consider that at a significant number of those 20 000 dysfunctional
schools teenage pregnancy is a major issue, learners go hungry on a daily basis
(and in some the provincial feeding schemes are being looted); there are 0%
matric pass rates in quite a few; children are regularly drowning in pit
latrines in others; and the senior girls in some of the high schools are
systematically being sexually abused by the teachers and even the principals.
There should be a state-led project, bigger than anything we have seen
in the last 25 years and designed by people far smarter than me, to fix this, once and
for all.
What has the actual response been? Apart from inserting himself into the
limelight at schools where issues arise from time to time, Lesufi hasn’t really
done much that is easily seen.
He has been on about the apartheid spatial planning issue for a while.
The introduction of the online registration system was, at heart, intended to force
functioning schools to take in learners who live in areas where the local
schools have collapsed. In line with that, the Gauteng Education Department last week
decreed that school feeder zones will be expanded to a 30km radius instead of
the previous 5km.
The move will prevent schools from turning down applicants who live far
away, and to the extent that some schools are doing that to deliberately
exclude learners who they see as undesirable, it’s a good thing. Not that all school
do that. For many of them, changes in suburban demographics have forced them to
trawl for learners from further afield for a long time now anyway. In cases
where schools have enough children in their immediate surroundings to fill their
classrooms, the implication that some of them will have to travel to a school
further away to make room for other applicants who live up to 30km away just doesn’t make
practical sense.
It’s a band aid exercise. Let’s force the functional schools to take in
the learners from the areas where the schools don’t work and we won’t have to
work out how we are going to fix those dysfunctional ones.
The 1000 functioning schools will become overcrowded, and some of them
will drop off that list and the 20 000 dysfunctional ones will remain the same,
or deteriorate further.
Simplistic solutions are not helpful, I know, but there are well-paid,
elected people who should be working on the complex ones. When they come up
with ones that do work they should be more about raising the failing schools up
than about dragging the working ones down.
Changing feeder zones will get a lot of approval but it will not make a
sustainable difference. The one educational system that Panyanza Lesufi is calling for will never exist until they get those 20 000 dysfunctional schools working.
No comments:
Post a Comment