Confusion Worse Confounded
The start of the new school year has not brought with it many reassuring signs. If anything, there have on all fronts been indications of worsening confusion in a process that the government claims is its education integration policy coming on stream. This confusion followed in the wake of the publication of the "integrated" Senior certificate results for 1995. The fact that more than sixty out of every one hundred pupils failed that examination is confirmation in no uncertain terms that if anything had changed it had been for the worse. More so, since the hyper-optimistic education spokespersons had been so bold as to predict that 1995 results would be a great improvement on the disastrous ones of 1994. It can therefore bring little joy to parents, teachers, pupils and students throughout the country to observe not only just what is happening in the schools but also what has been going on in the universities and colleges.
What has indeed marked the start of this year coupled with the comments of national and provincial education officers shows only too clearly that there is little understanding of either the nature or the size of the problems in South Africa's education systems. It did not help that by for the first time supplying figures for all the pupils in a province these people tried to hide the actual disasters that struck the schools in South Africa's rundown ghettos. If the authorities had hoped that such a stratagem would disguise the disasters they were being both naive and dishonest.
More than a quarter of a million Standard Ten pupils failed the examinations. That is the sad reality. It was a patently criminal thing to claim, as some persons did, that the 1995 results would be the best ever. The minority of schools that did do well could in no way, statistically or otherwise, conceal that the huge majority had continued the dreary saga of year-after-year collapse of learning and teaching in the schools of the oppressed. The manipulation of figures to interpret results in such a way as to cheer people up was unforgivable humbug. It could not provide enough cover even for those who refuse to face the facts of our situation.
The causes of this national disaster are many. But there are factors over which a measure of control can be exercised. The collapse of the culture of learning is itself due to many causes. And this breakdown is not easy to remedy. About the culture of teaching very many things can and need to be said. In many areas the morale of teachers is low. Yet we have every right to ask whether the responses to so challenging a situation in education can at all be said to reflect the approach expected of professionally-trained persons willing to battle against the problems they face. Reports of teacher absenteeism, bunking, dereliction of duty, and their use of school situations to attend to and advance their private business and other interests are all too common. There is too much evidence in many places of a systematic cover-up by both the authorities and charlatans claiming to speak for a minority of teachers whose baleful influence upon schools is something pupils and parents could well do without.
But whatever the causes, there is little in what has been done or what is planned for the immediate future that provides any answer for what has become all too widespread a norm - the dysfunction of our schooling system. This system is the product of an accumulation of anti-education policies and pressures. These causes have been at work for a long time. They have proved stubborn in the extreme. So stubborn in fact that the Gauteng Minister of Education, Ms Mary Metcalfe, has been driven to acknowledge that effecting real change will take many, many years.
On the other hand, the Minister of National Education, Sibusiso Bengu, has promised a second White Paper on education in February this year. Model C schools, he declares, must go. But previous White Papers, products of the Education Ministry's teams of experts, provide a formula for the continuation of Model C schools in another guise. A reality is rolling over countless schools throughout the country: it is creating "Model C" schools among all communities that are desperate to get their children inside schools and to get them taught. That is one pressure acting upon such schools. Another springs from the teaching staff's desperate need for funds to run the schools, to make up for shortages of books, equipment, running costs and the many unforeseen demands made upon schools. This is all part of a multi-billion subsidy that parents are having to pay to individual schools because the political-economy of the country cannot provide a self-sufficient national budget. Past governments could not and would not finance adequate unsegregated education. The present government cannot either. It does not understand why this is so nor will it reveal the truth of certain aspects of the dilemma that faces it. The fees that are now being demanded of parents have become a punitive indirect tax forced upon them.
So the overcrowding in schools continues. There are overcrowded classes without teachers. There is a shortage of teachers with suitable qualifications to undertake the reshaping of syllabuses and curricula. Yet the government is under pressure to retrench tens of thousands of teachers. It has cut to the bone the numbers of new entrants into teacher-training colleges. It has recognised that the poor results in schools are due to overcrowding and to ill-equipped and overburdened teachers. But as official policy it is now raising the pupil-teacher ratios to the ridiculous, unmanageable levels of 40-1 in Primary and 35-1 in Secondary schools. It has pursued a policy of retrenching experienced teachers and stripping schools of staff members whose services are vital to their satisfactory administration.
The net result of these pressures coming from many different directions but homing in upon the schools is the creation of two types of "Model C" schools. The first type derives from those that sprang up to serve the earlier enfranchised population, schools that were freely subsidized. Whether these now undergo a name change so that "Model C" no longer rings down the corridors of education reform and they become "public" schools, they will remain substantially what they now are: schools to which economically-better-off parents may send their children. Such schools will be found in geographic and social environments conducive to a proper functioning of educational institutions. The second derives from schools confined to the ghettos, to the "frayed edges of the cities". Here, in their continuous struggle to liberate their children from the fate suffered by the senior pupils of 1995 and the decades before that, an increasing number of parents will pay increasing fees (taxes) even as the confusion that now reigns in education becomes worse confounded.
"Free education" will arrive in yearly doses so that by the year 2000AD "free, compulsory education" may have reached Grade 9 (Std 7) and, under pressure from the experts education will be aimed at getting the children ready for the labour market. This is the dead hand of Dr. Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd directing his political heirs to marry schooling and the demands of a reeling economy in an expensive, muddled mismatch. This is no idle speculation. This must be the inevitable consequence of the sad and sorry saga of nearly two years of their kind of planning. The lack of supplying elementary prior educational needs sticks out like a sore thumb. Syllabuses, curricula and teachers' guidelines are not available yet to all schools. There is a desperate plan to import several hundred Mathematics and Science teachers from Cuba. There is no known plan to upgrade the skills of existing teacher corps in Primary and Secondary schools in those subjects so as not to make the lives of the Cuban guests an educational ordeal of any kind.
Their failure to recognise the fundamental causes of the state of the South African economy - and thus those of the education budget - must drive the Ministers of Education, their directors and their planners to fantasize in the way they do. Those economic factors underlie the crippling, clumsy planning that we now see. The whole chain of social, economic and historical causes is just one side of our immense problem. Another is the failure to recognise and to act upon a simple reality: that no education system can function, and succeed, unless there is a teaching corps at all levels in that system to produce, sustain and develop it in such a way as to advance a society out of the swamps into a semblance of a democratic, non-racial, formation able to provide adequately the human needs of all its people.
(THE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL VOL.66 #1, OFFICIAL ORGAN OF THE TEACHERS' LEAGUE OF SOUTH AFRICA, JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1996)
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