Die toekoms van
Christelike Afrikaanse onderwys moet gesien word binne die konteks van die
groter onderwysprentjie in die land, ‘n prentjie wat pas deur TLU SA in ‘n
mediavrystelling geskets is met die feite kaalkop soos dit is en sonder om
doekies om te draai. Die mediavrystelling is slegs in Engels beskikbaar en word
hiermee geplaas soos dit ontvang is.
EDUCATION IN SOUTH
AFRICA - A MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE
After 25 years of rule, the
governing African National Congress (ANC) has a shaky record on almost all
fronts. In 1994 the party was handed a top rate developed country on a plate.
The ANC has added very little to this state of affairs, but they have destroyed
much. The bulk of South Africans are poorer than ever, unemployment has
skyrocketed, and nobody really knows the country’s actual population figures.
This has led to unfettered crime, a breakdown in infrastructure and heavy tax
loads on a few.
After gaining control of South
Africa, it should have been an easy ride for the ANC. But a developed country
needs some developed mindsets at the top. Revolution was a breeze but it soon
became apparent that running an industrialised first world economy takes more
than fists in the air and empty slogans. The party faithful should not have
needed Black Economic Empowerment because the popular narrative was that they
had been suppressed for hundreds of years. With the abolition of apartheid,
restrictions were lifted and thousands of impatient black entrepreneurs and
budding business tycoons should have descended on South Africa’s economic
domain, laptops in hand ready to take advantage of the opportunities
purportedly denied them in the past. This of course didn’t happen because had
there been an historical indigenous entrepreneurial spirit, it would have
manifested itself hundreds of years ago: Jan van Riebeeck would have found a
civilization akin to other countries of the world when he set foot in Cape Town
in 1652.
Alas the Dutch gentleman came upon
what other explorers found as they sailed into the outer reaches of a
Eurocentric world – a society in Southern Africa differing little from what was
found in the rest of Africa and other parts hitherto unknown.
The entrepreneurial spark which had
created great civilizations over thousands of years was lacking in less
developed terrains, and the huge cultural chasm that was at the time so
conspicuous between the settlers in Southern Africa and the people who had
migrated southwards from Central Africa still in fact exists today. It
manifests itself in many ways, but especially in the realm of education,
attitudes to learning and what can be achieved from that learning.
The progeny of those early peoples
in South Africa now find themselves locked together in a political system where
the black majority rules while the minorities (whites and others) have the
economic power and the knowhow needed to keep modern day South Africa afloat.
This was not how it was supposed to be for the ANC. Whether through self
delusion or wishful thinking, they imagined that taking the reins of power
would be accompanied by the savvy to know how to wield those reins.
Billions of rands have been spent
on black education with extremely poor results. It soon dawned on successive
education ministers that trying to equalize outcomes across the broad South
African spectrum was a pipe dream. The blame game was one of the government’s
first forays in this uncomfortable situation: Bantu education was the problem.
But many forgot that before the advent of the National Party in 1948, black
education in South Africa had been a hit and miss affair. Under the British
there was no formal education plan to educate the black population. That had
been left by and large to the missionaries.
The prime minister at the time Dr.
H.F. Verwoerd sent education specialists out to the countryside to see the
chiefs and headmen about planning and building schools in the rural areas for
the education of the blacks in their areas. There was stiff resistance - many
chiefs questioned the need for Western-style education - they saw it initially
as a threat to their hegemony. But the oft demonised “bantu education” was in
fact the start of a process to try to bring millions of illiterate people into
the modern world. It was a huge undertaking. There were no black teachers, and
white teachers were sent out to rural areas to tackle a task which at the time
was formidable.
Black languages had to be
formalised where nothing existed except verbal traditions, and millions were
taught to read and write. It was a rocky road and it is still a rocky road.
The ANC government has spent
billions on black education in order to eradicate “inequality”. In doing so
they have created a travesty - an education system where the results are
massaged and where monumental self delusion is exposed in the tortuous
manipulation of results which has now become par for the course in the
education ministry.
RESULTS
In 2015, the ANC developed a system
involving “progressed learners”. It entails pushing forward (progressing)
over-age pupils who have repeated Grade 11 more than once. None other than
South Africa’s trade unions have seen through this subterfuge and have
questioned why pupils are “progressed” through to matriculation (school
leaving) but where the majority of them are barred from writing the full final
exams!
Out of the 128 634 pupils who
failed Grade 11 in 2017 and were pushed to matric last year (2018), only 33 412
sat for all their subjects. Of these, 20 122 passed and 2 676 obtained passes
that allow them to enrol at traditional universities. So of the national pass
rate trumpeted by the Basic Education minister Angie Motshekga of 78,2%, a huge
95 222 pupils (around 63%) “progressed” matrics did not sit for all their
subjects and were thus unaccounted for in the final result.
Of the total number of purported
128 634 “matric students”, only 2.1/2 percent managed a university entrance
pass, while only around 27% sat for exams!
So what happened to the 63% odd
students who sat in class and were financed by the taxpayer? Where did they go
after they had been utilised to pump up “matric class” numbers, but who were in
actual fact simply wasting their time because they didn’t write the full matric
exams?
This ludicrous situation meant that
teachers spent much time on students who would never write exams! Plenty of wasteful
expenditure here! These progressed learners “solved the problem of overage
pupils”, said Professor Larry Ramrathan of the UKZN School of Education
Studies. But how was this problem solved? They simply occupied seats in class
and wasted teachers’ time and ended up with nothing!
National Teachers Union deputy
president Allen Thompson recently decried the government’s “progression”
policy. He said it demoralised teachers who spent the entire year on matrics
who were not allowed to write the full exam. He accused districts of “culling”
progressed pupils just before they were due to write exams. “They are made to
tick for a few exams so that they do not write seven subjects so even if they
fail, this will not affect the pass rate”.
This is pure chicanery. It is a
betrayal of black education and of those blacks who were promised “a better
life for all” but who have been set up to fail so that the education minister
can look good on the front pages of the newspapers.
Another trick up the sleeve of the
Basic Education department is the “100% pass rate” travesty. The rural Gcewu
High School in KwaMahleka in Pietermaritzburg’s trumpeted 100% pass rate raised
eyebrows until it was found that only four of its 46 matric students wrote the
whole exam. The other 42 students were encouraged to write the exams over two
sittings, the second in June 2019. These “progressed” pupils were pushed into
matric after failing Grade 11 twice. Whether they actually wrote the full exams
later on is not mentioned.
Numbers count with the Education
Minister, not the quality of outcome. In the Free State, some teachers told
weaker pupils not to write the exams “because you will fail”. An example of
twelve schools attaining 100% pass rate was printed in a Sunday newspaper but
only a small minority of pupils wrote exams. This 100% pass rate was actually
dishonest propaganda.
BUYING SPEECHES
A further manifestation of crafty
results massaging is the new practice of parents buying speeches and essays on
the internet. The whole point of an essay is to gauge the creative use of
language and the ability to express oneself after researching a subject. This
process is now completely lost. The concept of plagiarism is seemingly unknown.
Former education Professor Jonathan
Jansen who is now overseas declared after the 2017 results that the SA
education minister is guilty of “fake news”. “We know that 78% of SA children
(almost eight out of ten) cannot read with understanding in Grade 4. A recent
finding placed South Africa last among 50 countries with which South Africa was
compared”. Says Professor Jansen: “Forget that we know 9% of Grade 6 black
teachers cannot pass a Grade 6 Maths test. Forget that in some subjects the
pass mark is 30%. In other words, ignore completely the available scientific studies
of the actual state of the school system and pretend that the government is
doing a good job and that the ruling party has delivered on its promises of a
better life for all!”
This raises a question, says the
professor. “What does it say about a government that celebrates the few who ran
and survived the obstacle course from Grades 1 through 12 but ignores the
majority who failed along the way? This education department is a disgrace to
the nation. When the throughput of pupils from Grade 2 to matric is factored
in, South Africa’s pass rate for the past three years ranges from 37% to 41%.”
EQUALITY
This is why there is affirmative
action in South Africa, despite the fact that the ANC is in power. This is why
Black Economic Empowerment was created where blacks are supposedly “empowered”
by placing them in visibly prominent positions in already existing enterprises.
In fact there is still very little sign of real black entrepreneurship emerging
even after the ANC’s 25 years at the helm.
The problem is a serious one and is
in fact tragic for millions of black people because they are expected to
perform and excel within someone else’s culture. It is an injustice to those
black students whose parents sacrifice everything to give them an “education”
while they sit in school pretending to be students yet they are not allowed to
write exams because they may spoil the Education minister’s fake results.
South Africa is indeed a very
unequal society, but it simply mirrors the world at large. The only difference
is that the haves and the have nots are together in one geographical area
called the Republic of South Africa.
