But for all the turmoil, the prospects for healthy reform have never been better
David Macfarlane
Tottering universities, technikon turmoil, widespread academic demotivation and insecurity, resentful distance education institutions, simmering teacher unions, outraged private-education providers, 45% adult illiteracy, crisis in adult basic education and training … To say that the education year 2000 has been ”interesting” is to wallow in understatement.
The year will be remembered for the ways in which talk for several years of necessary ”rationalisation”, ”transformation” and ”reform” began to translate into turbulent practice and when the real bite concealed within these comforting euphemisms became painfully clear. ”Rationalisation”, after all, contains the word ”rational”, and who could oppose that? But when this leads to substantial job losses, swinging axes slashing at arts faculties, and dark talk of conspiracies to close certain institutions, the euphemism loses its power to soothe.
And yet the magnitude of the education malaise at all levels is also being matched by unprecedented intensity of innovative thinking from parts of the government and from some educationists. For all the bitterness, the clashes, the political in-fighting, there has never been a time when so much has been so vigorously debated; and the prospects of genuinely progressive reform that will benefit all South Africa’s people have never been better.
Even so, as the year approaches its end, news pouring in from a variety of tertiary institutions starkly reminds us of the immense toil and intense battles still to come. From the University of the Transkei come bitter suspicions of a government-led conspiracy to shut the institution down. From the University of Durban-Westville comes news that the senate has passed a motion of no-confidence in the vice-chancellor, and that pervasive staff demoralisation is leading to an exodus of the most talented academics.
From Vista University comes news that staff have been told that the university has no funds to pay salaries after March next year; that all promotions are frozen; that retrenchments will certainly occur; and that a credit balance three years ago has now mysteriously become a massive overdraft.
From Mangosuthu Technikon comes news that recommendations made by Minister of Education Kader Asmal’s own assessor that recent turmoil there be addressed by getting rid of the technikon’s principal have been ignored; to the astonishment of all at the technikon, the principal has now been reinstated.
From a number of colleges of education comes news of jittery apprehension about quite how the imminent mergers with universities will be handled and how many jobs will be lost. And from many universities, especially their humanities departments, comes news of wholescale cutbacks and downsizing.
Most recently, for example, Wits University’s prestigious School of Music faces the real prospect that students will have to take the practical components of their degrees outside the university despite the argument that a music degree without practical studies is useless, and despite the pattern of students being drawn to the school precisely because of the rich tradition of its practical teachers such as Malcolm Nay, Marion Freedman, John Coulter and Pauline Norzy.
Both the range and the depth of problems in tertiary education mean that Asmal has an extraordinarily thorny task on his hands now. He is due to present his national education plan, which will somehow incorporate the stormily controversial Council on Higher Education (CHE) report earlier this year, to the Cabinet late in January. Compounding his difficulties are the stinging rejections of key CHE proposals from interest groups too influential to be ignored, such as the South African Universities Vice-Chancellors Association and the National Association of Distance Education Organisations of South Africa.
Ominously and puzzlingly Asmal ratcheted tension levels up late last month with a swingeing broadside against ”the ivory tower” and ”the navel-gazing that academics specialise in”. Astonishingly, he declared it ”unthinkable that, six years after the introduction of a new Constitution, higher education institutions have not yet begun to grapple with how to create institutional cultures and identities that reflect the values of the new South Africa, in particular non-racism and non-sexism”.
Around the country, forums, committees and working groups that have been grappling with exactly these issues for rather longer than six years now have received this attack with bafflement. Is the ever-combative Asmal preparing for grim new year confrontations? If so, interesting times are set to continue.
As they are with the new school programme, Curriculum 2005. The political tensions earlier in the year around Asmal’s appointment of a committee to review the whole curriculum, and his going public with the committee’s report before briefing either the Cabinet or the African National Congress have abated for the moment. And the report’s lucidly user-friendly version of the curriculum, and of its underlying philosophy, outcomes-based education, is widely agreed to constitute real progress.
In a process overseen by University of Natal academic Professor Linda Chisholm, but requiring very full Department of Education cooperation, task teams are being set up for each of the curriculum’s new learning areas. And each team will need to have 50% education department representation. Whether this will facilitate or hinder the implementation process is a moot point, given the government education bureaucracy’s less than glittering record of delivery in the past few years.
The matric exam is set to be a flashpoint soon. In October Asmal received a report from the Cambridge International Examinations Team on the exam; and in November he met the provincial education MECs to discuss setting up a task team to review matric.
There are compelling reasons for this review. Its value as a passport to higher education has long been compromised by the fact that many universities and technikons have their own admissions testing; and this function of the exam benefits a minority of pupils anyway. The grossly inflated weight attached to the exam results is inconsistent with the sophisticated assessment procedures required by outcomes-based education. And it costs the country a staggering amount to administer: R303-million last year, for example. All for what?
Yet many have a large financial vested interest in keeping the matric exam exactly as it is. All those tuition schemes, revision classes and the like punting the message that matric is the most important exam you’ll ever write will see their cash cow disappear if the exam is fundamentally rethought. Expect some interesting battles in 2001.
Private education has become another hot spot, and is competing as never before with public-sector provision. Easily the year’s largest development in this area was the merger between the education interests of Naspers and Educor to form a new company, NewEd. Incorporating Damelin, Academy of Learning, Rapid Results College, Midrand Campus, Lyceum and Mentor Business College, the merger catapulted NewEd into the number one slot in private education, as the Competition Tribunal observed in its judgement on the merger. And public-private partnerships (between some universities and private companies, for example) are another major development.
All this is to the evident discomfort of the government, which has shown on occasion an irrational impulse to protect all public education by casting aspersions on the quality of all private education. It has shown a similar tendency with distance education providers, to the latter’s public ire. Some public institutions are, after all, utterly dysfunctional; some private and distance organisations are high quality. Steering a path here that will be acceptable to all, or even to a majority, is another of the thorny challenges Asmal’s national plan faces.
But the past year also showed some tentative signs of education resuscitation. The country’s technical colleges have long been a mystery to many: how many students do they have, how many are women, what subjects are studied and in what proportions, who teaches there and how qualified are the teachers? A report handed to Asmal in October provides the first-ever comprehensive survey of technical colleges, and it bristles with hitherto unknown data. There’s little cause for complacency in the data: 52% of staff in colleges at certain levels, and 18% of all staff, are unqualified or under-qualified; 86% of enrolments are in two vocational fields only; in 1998 46% of the total colleges budget were costs incurred in providing training to unsuccessful candidates.
But these data provide a first step in a process involving government, business and education one that has so far shown healthier signs of fruitful collaboration than most other areas of education.
The education department’s feel-good motto is ”Tirisano: Working together to build a South African education and training system for the 21st century”. As a reflection of this year, the motto would appear to be a case of wishful thinking.