When an increase in adolescent suicides in one rural community is thought to bear some relation to difficulties in paying school fees, a stark failure of government policy becomes visible.
The policy looks admirable on paper: if you can’t afford to pay fees, you don’t have to. But the practice is distressingly different. Parents who — understandably — cannot endure the humiliation of repeated public declarations of their own poverty are deciding not to send their children to school at all. Children of non-paying parents face insults and victimisation from teachers and peers. The policy is not working.
Eight years after our first democratic elections, much else still conspires to deny millions of children their constitutionally guaranteed rights to basic education. Minister of Education Kader Asmal last year told Parliament that 45% of schools have no electricity, 27% lack clean water, 66% have inadequate sanitation (and 12% no sanitation at all) and 43% are without telephones. In these classroom conditions even the most sophisticated policy developments are going to be meaningless.
There have certainly been massive policy strides since 1994, in a wholesale education revolution that aims to repair the comprehensive damage wrought by apartheid. The mere fact that we now know far more than ever before about the conditions prevailing in our schools constitutes real progress.
Asmal’s regular reports to the president on education performance in the provinces make for harrowing reading: undelivered textbooks, underspent budgets, violence in schools … (And, yes, some successes too). But, however dismal the picture they paint, the reports do get compiled, delivered to the president — and distributed to the media. This transparency deserves the highest praise.
By the same token, though, rationalisations for failing to address what is happening in the country’s classrooms look increasingly shopworn as our knowledge mounts. When children have to walk 20km to get to school, when an insanitary learning environment causes an outbreak of skin rashes, when hunger pangs prevent pupils from concentrating, when girls can no longer endure the sexual advances of their teachers and stop attending school, then policy alone — however progressive — is not enough
Action is now needed, and the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has shown that committed, skilful and persistent social pressure can compel the government to act. As with HIV/Aids treatments, so too now with education: we report elsewhere in this edition on the Education Rights Project (ERP), a newly formed body that, like the TAC, will wield litigation and social mobilisation to compel the government to meet its constitutional obligations on the right to basic education.
Last week’s landmark TAC judgement will surely provide massive and welcome impetus to the fledgling ERP. As is argued elsewhere in this edition, the judgement shows that the Constitution’s social rights are enforceable, and shows also just why those rights are essential: they protect the poorest and most vulnerable people in our society. Rightly, this is the ERP’s focus. We suspect — and hope — that the real education revolution is about to commence.
It’s not all black and white
The United Cricket Board (UCB) has done a merry egg-dance this week over its decision to scrap racial quotas. Eventually, it agreed that at least a third of the 15-member World Cup squad will not be white and that a ministerial task team will look at how the provinces are dealing with the issue.
It is tempting to believe that, now that the UCB is led by Gerald Majola and Omar Henry convenes the national board of selectors, at test level our cricket has outgrown the need any longer to play the numbers game. But can the same be said of all the provincial bodies? The increase in the number of blacks playing first-class cricket has exceeded, for one season, the quotas set. The reason for this, in our view, was that the quotas obliged the provinces actively to seek out black talent. We believe the maintenance of quotas at provincial level — for a set number of years — would help ensure this becomes a trend.
Suspicions have been voiced that the timing of the UCB’s scrapping of quotas has more to do with next year’s World Cup than with progress made in deracialising sport. If the UCB’s purpose was merely to make the country look good, Minister of Sports and Recreation Ngconde Balfour was right to intervene.
Quotas crassly create equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity is the preferable route to merit selection. But a recent example — the case of Mfuneko Ngam, the dynamic young Xhosa fast bowler — shows how difficult achieving the latter can be.
Ngam’s test career has been blighted by recurring injury. He has had extensive medical treatment to rectify this. But there is a reason for his proneness to injury. Doctors say he did not receive adequate nutrition as a child.
Ensuring that every South African child is properly fed is beyond the ability of the UCB. It will take a lot more than the goodwill of even the most able of administrators to create a truly level playing field for South Africa’s sportspeople.