I refer to the article by David Macfarlane titled: “We can’t afford silence” (October 26). I don’t understand why leading educationists in South Africa, the Education Department and Kader Asmal don’t just spell out the reason for the 85% drop in qualifying teachers, other than the effect of HIV/Aids.
Government policy has caused the closure of all 105 colleges of education. True, the plan was that many of the colleges would become subdivisions of Universities/Technikons (the merging referred to in the article?), thus surviving and falling into the higher education sector, as required by the Higher Education Act. This never really happened and, to the best of my knowledge, no effort was made by Asmal or the department to ensure that it did. The reality was that the closed down college became either a community college or something similar, or the respective university/technikon acquired the plant, property and students (to be phased out), and did not create a college subdivision, as stipulated in the Act. Hence the decrease in student numbers from 70000 to 13000.
Also, at least three factors militate against universities/technikons increasing teacher education numbers to compensate for those lost to society by the loss of the college sector. Firstly, most prospective student teachers in a developing country like South Africa prefer to work in a college setting they find it less threatening and prefer the nurturing environment provided by a college. Secondly, university faculties/ schools of education tend to be low in the pecking order of faculties, so teacher education will not be a priority for the higher-education institution. Finally, by their very nature universities/technikons have to maintain high academic standards. Having to cope with Senior Certificate graduates with “poor schooling” (quoting from the article) will place unacceptable responsibilities on the institutions.
The article mentions that the country’s teachers have to be trained in the new curriculum 2005 via inservice education. There are also 100000 unqualified or underqualified among this number. Universities are not geared for these two types of training. Until recently South Africa did have two distance education colleges, the South African College for Teacher Education and the South African College for Open Learning. They could have provided launching pads for the above in-service training. Alas, they met the same fate as other colleges. So NGOs will have to do the two jobs at enormous expense to taxpayers.
To the best of my knowledge, this is the only developing country to eliminate the college sector. Now we are paying for that strange decision. Dr SD Wallace, Pietermaritzburg