Sipho Seepe
no blows barred
Kader Asmal’s first public pronouncement when he took up his education portfolio was a breath of fresh air. With characteristic boldness, he declared that the education system was in crisis.
This unprecedented admission endeared the triumphant minister to the public. After five years of democratic governance, conditions in black schools remained appalling and fundamental inequities between black and white schools remained entrenched.
The entire system continued to be plagued by conditions spawned by apartheid: low teacher morale; maladministration and corruption; a salary bill that left little for development and a general lack of confidence in the public education system. In the tertiary sector, the system continued to reproduce racial and ethnic inequalities in financing, governance, academic seniority, research funding and output.
After a spectacular term in water affairs, Asmal had artfully won the media. His no-nonsense and hands-on approach, coupled with an eagerness to engage in intellectual debates on behalf of, and in defence of, both the government and the ruling party convinced all that we finally had an education minister with the intellectual credentials, energy, enthusiasm and commitment to turn education around.
His was an inspired appointment.
He wasted no time in promising to overhaul the system, launching his ambitious plan, Tirisano, with much aplomb, announcing the end of illiteracy in South Africa by 2004. He called for a review of Curriculum 2005 and indicated that an evaluation of the South African Qualifications Authority might also be undertaken.
The curriculum review brought a sigh of relief to those who had long questioned the viability of this ambitious project.
The review committee’s report vindi- cated those who had cautioned against the rushed implementation of Curriculum 2005 at the time they had been labelled counter-revolutionaries and prophets of doom.
Asmal then established a task team to advise him in reconfiguring higher education. Its Size and Shape Report came under fire. It was interpreted as calling for the closure of black institutions. Understandably it was rejected by, among others, the Association of Vice-Chancellors of Historically Disadvantaged Tertiary Institutions (Asahdi), various technikons and some members of the ruling party.
While his National Plan for Higher Education represents a shift and rejection of the majority of the Council for Higher Education proposals, its implementation is by no means secure. Professor Itumeleng Mosala, the chair of Asahdi, has suggested that the under-representation of African academics and intellectuals on his national working committee reflects the extent to which the minister holds this group in contempt.
This flurry of activity has been ill-considered and unstrategic in several respects, and has seen Asmal faltering in his mission.
First, while he might have impressed the media and those who appointed him, Asmal failed to rally support among critical stakeholders. He misunderstood that he was inserting himself into an educational community that had already been grappling with these issues and that already owned significant victories. His over-reliance on task teams, the composition of which has been consistently problematic, marginalised both the already established policy processes and important parts of the education community, including educational officials. His seemingly dismissive attitude led him to become involved in a war of words with influential groupings such as the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, the Congress of South African Students and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu).
Second, his boldness may indicate an under-estimation of the task at hand. Teaching at university does not, in itself, necessarily provide an insight into the complexities of education systems, let alone their transformation. Asmal clearly had little real understanding of the systemic complexities and intractable problems that educationists had been grappling with. Ironically, there is little that he has trumpeted that is not based on the foundation established in the first five years after 1994.
It is not surprising that in a performance review last year he was awarded an A in public relations, but an F for delivery by many observers. In the same year, at the seventh Cosatu congress, he was singled out as one of the country’s worst employers. His apology notwithstanding, Asmal’s unpopularity peaked this year with his castigation of Christians indicative of the heights of arrogance that the ruling party has reached where it accords itself the right to even interfere between people and their God.
Asmal was conspicuous by his deafening silence when the public looked for leadership regarding the causative link between HIV and Aids. With uncharacteristic coyness he indicated it was not his job to understand the cause of Aids, only to deal with its consequences. It took the courage of Cosatu, the South African Communist Party and a reluctant African National Congress national executive committee to dissuade President Thabo Mbeki from pursuing or publicly airing his eccentric ideas. Aside from weakening public trust in scientific research and sacrificing academic science on the altar of ideology, the debate had the potential to discredit the government’s efforts to combat the epidemic.
We could justifiably expect Asmal, as minister of education and a leading intellectual, to behave as if the propagation of correct ideas or of the best science available would take precedence over his need to ingratiate himself with the president. Instead, he preferred to rubbish those who questioned Mbeki’s “wisdom” as driven by anti-Mbeki frenzy. While he rebukes Mbeki’s critics for presenting the president as bereft of any redeeming qualities, Asmal’s obsequious loyalty prevents him from acknowledging Mbeki’s flaws.
It is in this context that Mbeki’s problematic invitation to Cuban science and mathematics educators to teach in South Africa must be understood. The invitation ignores the capacity that exists in many of our institutions that have established science and maths education units precisely to respond to the challenge to expand and upgrade science and maths education in schools. A more significant intervention would be to put into our schools the thousands of science graduates who presently roam our streets unemployed and the many good teachers who were driven out of the system as a result of the government’s poorly conceived and badly managed voluntary severance package policy.
The invitation to the Cubans ignores the growing appreciation of the role that language plays in science teaching. Science education research indicates that learners often harbour misconceptions that make mastery of mathematics and science extremely difficult. Avoiding or overcoming these difficulties necessitates linguistic clarity in the teaching of science a specialised language in itself with its own linguistic rules. This is true of first language speakers. It is compounded when learning and teaching occurs in a second or third language. Consideration must be given to lexical, semantic, syntactical and phonetic problems learners will encounter. Given that dissemination of scientific ideas requires concise, coherent, unambiguous definitions and clearly differentiated concepts, the use of second language speakers as educators risks exacerbating rather than alleviating learners’ misconceptions. It is obvious that both the president and the minister of education are blissfully ignorant of research in this area how else does one explain the Cuban intervention?
The decision smacks more of narrow political opportunism than of an attempt to solve an educational problem.