On Monday 19 October at 6.30pm, the fourth of the national DBSA Education Conversations will take place at Eden Grove Red at Rhodes University.
The topic is: How do we fix South African schools, and ensure education and opportunities for our young people? The emphasis will be on input from schools and pupils themselves, led by keynote speakers Dr Saleem Badat and myself.
On Monday 19 October at 6.30pm, the fourth of the national DBSA Education Conversations will take place at Eden Grove Red at Rhodes University.
The topic is: How do we fix South African schools, and ensure education and opportunities for our young people? The emphasis will be on input from schools and pupils themselves, led by keynote speakers Dr Saleem Badat and myself.
The series so far has elicited extraordinary interest from the public. There is enormous and widespread concern and desire among ordinary people to make a positive contribution.
Discussion has ranged from Jonathan Jansen’s views on citizenship at Free State University; to MEC Grant and Dr Mamphela Ramphele grappling with outcomes-based education (OBE) at University of Western Cape; to SADTU and a Soweto principal discussing with MEC Creecy in Gauteng the role of the department and its poorly performing support systems.
Also discussed were the non-negotiables in education such as teachers need to be in class, on time, teaching, and using textbooks.
In all the conversations, there is acknowledgment that we are just not getting it right in our schools. Our country is routinely last in all international tests, we just don’t have the skills base and are far from using the potential of our people to imagine, plan, implement and engineer the new developmental society, especially in this harsh and cutthroat world.
Even more distressing, is that these poor outcomes take on a racial dimension. While half of children drop out before matric, one in 10 white children gets an A aggregate in matric but only 1 in a 1000 black children attain the same results.
60% of young white people go on to university but only 12% of our black youth go on to study. 60-80% of our schools do not function as they should.
Such inequalities are unsustainable in a democracy where all our children rightly expect to be able to shoot for the stars.
Instead of providing opportunities and routes to success, we exclude and marginalise our youth. We continue to put roadblocks and hurdles in their paths.
Yet there is nothing wrong with our children. Sadly, our schools fail generation after generation of our young.
A toxic mix of factors holds us back. Some are historical, as in the actions of former president Henrik Verwoerd effectively banning maths in black schools and some are more recent mistakes around OBE and teacher retrenchments.
In-school factors affect teaching quality; there is poor administration and support around the school especially from the education district and all the social impacts of poverty hold us back, from HIV/Aids to intestinal worms to gangs, transport, hunger and backlogs, from libraries to labs to staffrooms and classrooms.
Yet, as the Development Bank of South Africa coordinated Education Roadmap showed, we are all in this together.
It is not about a blame game. We need to prioritise what it is we can do and where we can best make the change.
We need a vision of excellence and intellectual achievement, of a learning nation seeking to be the best it can.
As a nation, the sad truth is that we have not yet had the conversation on where we expect our schools, our colleges and universities to be. We do not yet have a plan and an agreed set of actions.
This is why we need to rise to the challenge to make education our number one priority and the widest social concern.
We must talk, decide, and then all put our shoulders to the wheel if we are to make the difference that will revitalise our education and lay the foundations for generations to come.
