Diehard rightwingers and fringe religious groups aside, no one denies that our education system needs radical and comprehensive measures to repair the ravages that apartheid over decades and colonialism over centuries inflicted on the majority of South Africans.
This newspaper has consistently applauded the government for setting our education system on the long, arduous and complex path to achieving equity, redress and efficiency, among many other goals. But the latest stage in our education revolution suggests that a crisis is on our hands now — one the Ministry and Department of Education seem content to smother in soothing words and upbeat rhetoric.
We report this week the well-grounded fears that teacher unions and other educationists express about the recently released Further Education and Training (FET) draft curriculum statements. These have been produced on the basis of inadequate and sometimes non-existent data about the very teachers on whom implementation critically depends.
How many teachers will be needed, how many will need to be retrained, how much all this will cost and where the money will come from are among crucial factors on which officialdom is silent.
Minister of Education Kader Asmal certainly deserves credit for the undoubted gains made in turning education around. On the other hand, the buck stops with him — and we pay him for that. The looming FET crisis is not the first time we and others have had cause to suggest that Asmal’s most impressive public flourishes too often remain just that: all symbolism and no substance, as one of the country’s leading educationists depressingly describes the FET development.
Last year, this newspaper had the impertinence to point out that Asmal had failed to deliver on one of his more flamboyant promises. Within a year of launching his adult literacy initiative in June 2000, there would be half a million learners, he said. One year on, not one person had been rendered literate. Predictably enough, the Cabinet’s prickliest member flayed us. But journalists for their part are also paid to take that sort of thing, so we do not complain.
This week, though, Asmal was at it again. Responding in another newspaper to a number of prominent stakeholders’ even-handed, constructive and concerned analyses of the state of education, Asmal bristled with sarcasm and name-calling — while contradictorily welcoming debate.
He reserved his lowest body blow for the general secretary of the South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, whose contributions are never less than thoughtful. No, said Asmal: ” [the general secretary’s] view … is inevitably shaped by his position” — and so is not to be taken seriously? Do an education minister’s views mysteriously escape such influences?
But in the exchange of blows with journalists, unionists and any who dare to venture a critique, the people who really matter get forgotten. Currently, they are the thousands upon thousands of children whose education and futures will be blighted if FET is not implemented thoroughly and successfully. They are also the country’s teachers, who urgently need the clearest and most comprehensive direction and leadership possible.
Any radical education change needs three vital elements to be working together: the curriculum framework itself (which involves what will be taught and how), learner support materials (including, crucially, textbooks), and teacher development. If one of these is faltering, the whole structure collapses, and no change can take purchase.
We now have two impressive curriculum frameworks — last year’s for grades R to 9, and now FET. Getting textbooks into schools remains a problem, though here there is progress.
But we still do not have a coherent, national strategy for teacher development and teacher supply. If Asmal can bequeath the country that, he will leave us with a gift beyond price.
Right royal mess
The sorry saga of Zena Mahlangu’s abduction by aides of Swaziland’s King Mswati, and subsequent attempts to intimidate the judiciary, underscore the fact that there is more than one tyrant in our region.
Swaziland generally escapes the intense international attention focused on Zimbabwe because of its economic and political insignificance and — let us be frank about it — because Mswati’s regime has not targeted whites. But it is every bit as repressive and undemocratic. The king sent the police commissioner, army commander and prisons chief to communicate his orders for the dropping of the abduction case. They and the attorney general, Phesheya Dlamini, threatened the judges in their chambers.
Dlamini’s subsequent apology has defused the “constitutional” crisis, if one can exist in a country where the Constitution has been suspended and the monarch is the fount of all power. But the climb-down would not have happened without the threat of a general strike and extensive local and international media coverage. The arbitrary rule of Mswati and the parasites of the royal family remains intact. Sooner or later there will be other outrages.
Swaziland’s absolute monarchy, and its despotic vagaries, do Africa’s standing in world eyes no good. In its small way, it is an obstacle to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. It is time the tiny kingdom moved up South Africa’s foreign policy agenda.