Barbara Ludman
EIGHTY percent of black South Africans and about 40 percent of whites cannot read or compute at a Standard Five level, according to a report released this week.
In the first-ever nationwide study of literacy, Indian respondents showed the highest average literacy levels. Coloured participants scored, on average, between black and white literacy rates.
The Harvard University/University of Cape Town literacy study was based on the Project for Statistics on Living Standards and Development undertaken by UCT’s Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit (Saldru).
“We were simply shocked when the basic numbers emerged,” says the Saldru project director, UCT economist Dr Pundy Pillay. “The magnitude of these racial inequities is enormous.”
Among African participants generally, literacy levels were higher in townships than in rural areas; literacy rates were higher in families with few children than in those with many children; and there was a discernible link between household income and literacy.
Participants sat a 14-question test set at Standard Five level to assess basic language comprehension and numeracy skills, both in English and, where relevant, in their mother tongue.
The study found certain patterns: literacy in mother tongue was “highly correlated with proficiency in English and basic numeracy”; and men in most cases scored better than women. One would expect the length of time spent in school to improve the participant’s scores. However, while coloured men stay in school a half-year longer than women, and coloured men scored better than women did on the test, African women stay in school a half-year longer than the men — but female literacy was not higher.
The report finds “basic causal processes that we argue lead to unequal levels of literacy among individuals”: family background, household characteristics, the number of years spent in school.
But it also notes that “blacks suffer from the lowest- quality schools” and although access to schools improved after 1976 and black students stayed in school an average two years longer, results were no better than they had been before 1976. In fact, matric pass rates plummeted, from 90 percent to less than 40
“The study draws attention to the necessity for improvements not only in access and equity, on which there has been some movement in the past year, but also in quality of education,” says Dr Linda Chisholm of the Education Policy Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand. “Obviously changes in teacher education, textbooks and other resources are critical here. The link between educational quality and adequate working conditions and salaries for teachers also needs to be appreciated more fully.”
There were exceptions: Tswana, Zulu and Xhosa participants overall did better than other African groups; Tswana women scored the highest of any African
The high scores of Tswana participants “could be rooted in their community context and in the historical policies of the old Bophuthatswana bantustan”. In the early 1980s, Bophuthatswana experimented with a primary school upgrading programme, drawing parents into the running of the schools, retraining teachers to adopt a child-centred approach, expanding and upgrading school buildings, dropping double sessions, and using materials based on the Molteno Project. The primary school dropout rate decreased significantly.
The study indicates that while staying in school longer is likely to improve literacy levels and the quality of schools is crucial, other factors also play a critical
There was, for example, a link country-wide between economic achievement and literacy, perhaps because students from families where someone was bringing in money could stay in school longer.
There was also an inverse link between male students’ achievement and the presence of a father in the home: “Male youths residing in father-absent households scored slightly higher on the literacy test,” the report notes. “This may stem from a tendency by mothers to invest more in schooling than do fathers. Part of this effect also may be due to fostering-out of high- achieving boys to kin members who live in neighbourhoods with higher quality schools.”
On the other hand, “girls’ school attainment is higher when the father is present, stemming perhaps from higher income levels observed among father-present …
Among African families, the absence of a mother had no effect; but among coloured families, it pushed the achievement scores down.
Basic literacy in mother tongue was higher than literacy in English among groups whose mother tongue is not English; and, says the study, “mother tongue literacy is strongly correlated with English literacy”.
Overall, the report expresses dismay at the generally low level of literacy among all respondents. “For youths and adults fully literate at the Standard Five level, a perfect score should have been achieved,” the report notes, yet “basic literacy is not overwhelmingly impressive, even for the previously dominant (white) ethnic group.
“But inter-racial inequalities remain wide and deep- seated. This suggests that policies aimed at further enrolment expansion must be balanced against concerted efforts to raise school quality and to boost actual literacy levels.
Universities standing at the crossroads
THE national Department of Education has declared all 21 of our universities as national assets whose futures need jealous preservation. Universities enjoy this status because they above all cater for the development, nurturing and evolution of the highest values of our society that are critical for the success of the Reconstruction and Development Programme and our international competitiveness.
Equally, the department has issued a clarion call for all these institutions to transform in a fundamental way. Transformation is an act or process whereby the form, shape or nature of something is completely changed or altered, a blueprint change. This definition is important to distinguish transformation from reformation. Reformation is the process of modification without fundamental change, a cosmetic change.
The universities of South Africa are the products of apartheid from every angle one wishes to understand or classify them. They could not enjoy autonomy and academic freedom as it is universally defined and known; they could not teach what they like; they could not admit or recruit whom they thought suitable to teach until recently.
University education was pursued with half-baked and half-hearted visions and missions. As a result, the student populations and staff profiles, the distribution of hierarchies, the missions and visions, the cultural values within all these are disproportionately skewed to reflect the legacy of a sad past.
It is within this context and background that a back- to-basics transformation of universities is needed and justifiably called for.
The question, then, is what is a university in modern Africa? It surely cannot be the same as the one in Europe, the United States, Japan or China. It may be guided by the same general underlying principle, but the objective should clearly be different. When Europeans decide about their institutions, be they French, German or British, the first principle is to capture the essence of France, Germany or Britain.
The primary principle of university in South Africa should be to capture and encapsulate the essence of Africa. An African university must be one that draws its inspiration from its environment, not a transplanted tree, but one growing from a seed that is planted and nurtured in the African soil.
The pursuit of knowledge and the truth for its own sake is a dead concept, untenable in almost all societies. The global competition, the involvement of industry in universities, the social, economic and political pressures of modern society, have made the latter principle obsolete. The pursuit of knowledge and the truth with a purpose and social responsibility is what universities are about.
If these principles are fully appreciated it will become immediately obvious that transformation is not just mechanistic, is not simply about changing the colours of people, but is a deep process underlined by solid principles that will lead to the total and genuine liberation of white and black people in this part of the continent.
For whites it will unchain and decouple them from the romance, the preoccupation with Europe as the source of supreme ideas and values and finally bond them permanently to Africa. It will release black people from the chain of perpetual psychological inferiority and bondage to free-thinking people. It is within these polarities of dreams, vision, interpretation and ideation that the transformation process at universities has its greatest challenge, namely to facilitate the emergence of a new nation with a common vision, principles, values and culture system based on the highest intellectual foundations.
Africa is littered with failures of democracies and tertiary education systems. The single biggest failure of colonial powers, civilisation and education in Africa has been the failure to capture the essence of Africa and its indigenous people, the failure to adapt and integrate Western culture into the African culture.
This transitional period in our history is the opportune time for all our institutions to take stock and ask hard, soul-searching and fundamental questions about who they are, which knowledge is crucial and important, what are the consequences of knowledge and research to future generations in the shaping of thought, values and society, what are the unique features of these institutions in Africa today? In what ways these features can best be exploited to shape the people of this continent and the world in the future.
What universities should be doing is to trans-educate, trans-orient, trans-socialise and harmonise the various perceptions and paradigms in which South African society has its roots, namely the African, European and Oriental. What they should avoid is the “imitation thinking” or soft approach that they are simply extensions of Western culture located in Africa. Great nations are not built through imitation.
The transformation process is overarching and embraces a series of closely related, interlinked and interdependent themes. These are equity, governance, access, affirmative action, curricular change, effectiveness and development. These themes are underlined by race, gender and the cultural dimensions. Each of these has a structural and a functional
It is within this broad framework that all institutions will have to operate to realise the true value of a transformed university education. The African continent is crying for an authentic and successful university structure. It is for the universities of South Africa to re-examine and redefine tertiary education in a fundamental way.
Professor Makgoba is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at the University of the Witwatersrand