declining
Your articles (November 19 to 25) about the problems in tertiary education should have mentioned the declining standards in the quality of people who are being appointed as professors in our universities, and the lack of any professional body that can punish them for misconduct.
A case in point occurred recently in Pietermaritzburg. An elderly retired couple who live near the University of Natal incurred the ire of two men who live in the same neighbourhood, when the couple’s servant put their garbage bag at the corner of the street instead of outside their house. The upshot was that the elderly couple responded to a knock on their front door to find the two men standing outside, one of them with an Alsatian dog. The bearded man of the two screamed at them: “You fucking bitch! You fucking shithead!” As the elderly couple watched in horror, the man took the garbage bag and strew its contents all over their verandah. As he left, he shook his fist in the old man’s face and shouted, “Next time I’ll fucking kill you!”
The incident left the elderly couple traumatised and fearful. In any light, the conduct of the two men would be appalling. But what makes the incident infinitely more shocking is that the man who shouted the obscenities and made the death threat is a professor of law at Natal University. The other is apparently a professor of economics.
Friends of the couple thought that they ought to lay criminal charges against the two men. But the criminal courts of Pietermaritzburg are in chaos. When the old man later suffered a stroke, this option became completely impracticable.
Reports have filtered back that the law professor still regales his friends over dinner with the story and boasts of the lesson that he taught the old man he sneeringly calls “dirty Dyall”.
If the law professor had been a lawyer, he could be summoned to appear before the Bar Council. If he was an attorney, he could be struck off the roll. But, because he is a professor of law in the employ of a university, he is apparently accountable to no one. He is able to act with complete impunity from disciplinary action, even for criminal invasions of private property and the making of a death threat.
One would have thought that a person of such low character and filthy tongue, who clearly holds the law, the Constitution and civilised values in utter contempt, is the last person who should be teaching the upcoming generation of young lawyers. Yet no action has been taken against him by anyone. – Friends of the Dyalls, Pietermaritzburg
Dear Prof Asmal
You don’t know me – I live in a small town on the coast which most people only know as a seaside resort. But I’ve lived here for 15 years and I’m writing to you now because a small tragedy is taking place in our small town.
Let me introduce to you my son Thomas. He’s a bright kid: he can write, he can read most words you care to put in front of him, he can colour inside the lines, he can cut out quite intricate figures, he can count up to 100 if you’re a little patient. He’s also a sensitive kid who’s wise to his abilities and those of his friends. “I’m not clever like Isaac,” he says to me at bedtime, “because I can’t swim.” How crestfallen will he be when he’s told he can’t go to school next year?
Thomas turns six in March 2000, and he’s one of the thousands of children with birthdays between January and June who fall into the vacuum created by the new school admissions policy. Until Monday last week we were assured that, as in the past, special cases would be considered if they were motivated. Until Monday last week he and a handful of other children in his situation had places in grade one of our local school.
Until Monday last week, that is, when an article in the press persuaded the principal how punitively this policy will be applied. Private schools which buck the system face deregistration. What will happen to a state school which admits underage children? What will happen to the children when the monster machinery of state finds them out?
The reason for the new policy, we were told, is the high failure rate in grade one. Special attention, we discovered, was supposed to be given in 1999 to an information and advocacy campaign to ensure compliance.
An early childhood development provision, we found out, is supposed to be bolstered by a reception year which will house all those children who, like Thomas, have overnight become too young to enter grade one. The problem is that news of the implementation of the policy only reached our town late this year.
There is no reception year for Thomas and his fellows to enter. Even if there were, he’s completed the school readiness programme at the local pre-primary. That is, he’s already done it.
As an educationist I work on a daily basis with transforming curricula in terms of the new qualifications framework, and I am left wondering what has happened to the recognition of prior learning in this instance.
If children have met outcomes specified at the preceding level, why should they be discriminated against on grounds of age? Why should they be denied access to the next level of education provision? Why should they be forced to repeat work they have already done?
There is a case for sticking to a principle if it is sound, and implementing a policy if it is good. This one is not. All over the world, the school admissions age is being lowered, not raised. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the policy is money-driven. It is also short- sighted.
Raising the admission age may well see a statistical drop in the failure rate in grade one. Doing so without providing for those excluded will save the state millions in education subsidies next year, as teachers who face retrenchment will doubtless soon find out. What will it cost in the long run?
There is no provision for Thomas to progress in your system, Professor Asmal – none for him and none for the hundreds of thousands of children like him throughout the country whose Christmas present this year will be the news that they can’t go to big school. – Professor Myrtle Hooper, University of Zululand, Mtunzini
Stench of being PC
I was comforted to see that at least one reader had questioned the dreadful article printed under Right to Reply in response to Charlene Smith’s article. If the authors of “Rape is not about ‘fun’ and the donor dollar” (November 19 to 25) are working on behalf of abused and raped women, then we are in a more desperate situation than at first thought.
There is a lot of discussion at present about the reason for such high rape statistics in this country, and many people believe that to look at rape from a solely “rape is related to power” angle may be obfuscating the search for solutions.
Attitudes towards women and sex in this country show that many believe that sex is a man’s right. Women are here to serve men. It does not need much extrapolation to see that this could indeed lead some men, when feeling the need for a quick shag after a boozy evening, to take the first woman passing.
It would seem the authors, so obviously miffed by Smith’s article, are blinded by their sense of their own worthiness. They seem to feel any new thinking as to the causes of rape, other than the accepted one (which is probably based on research in Europe anyway), is an attack on their integrity. The stench of political correctness was so strong it came right off the page.
Smith, and anyone else who is willing to think laterally about rape, must be supported. It is extremely dangerous and short-sighted to insist, as these two women appear to do, that there is only one correct view as to the psychology behind rape. In any event, they seemed far more interested in defending and promoting their own roles in the “struggle” than debating solutions. – R Clarebrough, Yeoville