Black education is in dire straits and if steps are not taken to alleviate enormous injustices in the system, prospects in the “new South Africa†are bleak. That is the conclusion reached by an independent working group called the Third Alternative, who spent 30 months and nearly R400 000 compiling a detailed survey of black education.
Funded by 75 of the largest companies in the country, the survey was described as ”the largest and most wide-ranging study ever carried out in the field of black education”. The Third Alternative interviewed 10 000 people throughout the community – including drop-outs, pupils, parents, teachers, educationists and leaders – before publishing findings that ”paint a bleak picture of inequality, poverty, neglect and wasted human potential”.
Among the statistics unearthed by the survey were:
- The average number of books in black homes was between six and nine. (30 percent of pupils aged 14-21 claimed there were no books at home.)
- 5 percent of black children have their own desk at home, while 80 percent of homes have no electricity.
- The survey found a perfect correlation between income and levels of education.
- 59 percent of the adult black population is not working.
- Per capita expenditure on black education each year (including capital expenditure) is R765 in Department of Education and Training schools, R622 in the ”self-governing states”, R481 in ”independent homeland” schools and R3 082 in white schools.
- To bring per capita expenditure on black education in line with white education, an additional R19-billion would have to be spent yearly.
This would bring total education spending to almost 50 percent of total government expenditure.
- By the year 2 000, 457 000 teachers will be needed in black schools. At present there are only 180 000.
- 34 percent of DET teachers do not have matric.
- 77 percent of white students reached matric last year while 25 percent of blacks passed.
- 24 percent of black adults have no education. Only two percent have any post-matric education.
- About 10 percent of black students drop out of every grade each year. The overriding reason given for dropping out is poverty (about 57 reasons were pregnancy (10 percent of girls) and arguments with teachers (10 percent of boys).
- An estimated 1,6-million children aged six to 17 are not at school.
- 49 percent of black parents and 58 percent of pupils and teachers would prefer to be taught mainly or exclusively in English.
- 87 percent of blacks want totally integrated schooling, while around 47 percent of whites interviewed (75 percent English speakers and 24 percent of Afrikaners).
- Black pupils stated medicine, teaching, police/defence and agriculture as their preferred occupations. Politics and journalism came last on their list. Third Alternative also put forward suggestions to ease the crisis.
According to convener Teddy Langsmidt, what is needed to improve the present system in “an alliance community organisations, educationists and the private sector to mobilise the vast re¬sources required to save the situation to save the children. ”There is no more time, and there is no other alternative.” In the long term, the answer lies in a single, unified non-racial system which makes equal schooling compulsory from an early age, which most people saw as a state responsibility, he said.
In the meantime however, much could be done by the private sector working in close conjunction with ”authentic community representatives”. Langsmidt said they had found during their research that most people regarded the ANC-aligned National Education Co-ordinating Council (NECC) as an authentic representative organisation. ”No project will succeed unless it is an alliance of all the relevant parties, and is firmly rooted in the community,” he said.
This article originally appeared in the Weekly Mail.
