Adult literacy in ‘parlous state’

About half the country’s adults have less than nine years of schooling, and three million no education at all. But there has been ‘no significant progress in adult literacy since the end of the apartheid era”, adult basic education receives less than 1% of the national education budget, and most provincial spending in this area is also less than 1% of education funding.

The education of those who are too old to attend school is ‘scandalously neglected”, argues Dr Peter Rule, lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg).

Rule’s examination of adult basic education and training (Abet) accompanies the Education Rights Project’s (ERP) addition in the second week of March of Abet to its agenda.

Based at Wits University’s Education Policy Unit and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies, the ERP has focused since early last year on a range of issues that prevent people from enjoying their full constitutional rights to basic education.

The ERP’s research, community work and activism have centred on school fees, sexual harassment of learners, farm schools and school infrastructure as well as possible legal action over the government’s constitutional obligations.

‘The government is failing to meet its constitutional obligation in providing adult basic education,” Rule argues in his paper.

For the purposes of defining Abet, an adult is 16 years or older, not engaged in formal schooling or higher education, and has an educational level of less than grade nine. And ‘an adult is considered to be illiterate and/or lacking in basic education if he or she has received no education or less than seven years of formal schooling”.

About 50% of the country’s adults — 10-million people — have less than nine years of schooling, Rule says, and nearly three million have no education at all.

‘The statistics regarding illiteracy are striking when examined through the lens of economic activity,” Rule writes. ‘A 1994 study shows that 32% of formally employed workers have less than nine years of schooling. On the other hand, the figures are 57% for unemployed adults, 67% for the informally employed and 80% for those employed in the agricultural sector.”

And the 1999 October Household Survey ‘confirms this trend: 90,7% of non-urban people have no training”. The implication is that ‘there is a strong link between poverty and illiteracy, particularly rural poverty”.

Adult basic education is ‘in a parlous state just at a time in our history when we need to engage all our human resources optimally”, Rule argues. This is despite ‘a strong enabling legislative framework” for Abet. There are also public adult learning centres run by provincial education departments, and Sectoral Education and Training Authorities under the jurisdiction of the Department of Labour, to implement Abet.

Yet ‘literacy campaigns have not worked effectively in South Africa over the past seven years: multi-year implementation plans have been drawn up but never implemented”. The provincial Abet councils ‘have faded away”. And learner numbers are ‘far below what the development of our country and our people requires”.

Rule analyses the Abet Act of 2000 to show the legislation’s two contending conceptions of Abet: its language of democracy, redress and human rights competes with language concerning the economic imperatives of the growth, employment and redistribution (Gear) policy.

‘Despite the human rights discourse within the Abet Act and numerous other policy statements and plans, the government focuses on formal and instrumental conceptions of basic education,” Rule argues. That is, the beneficiaries of the government’s National Skills Development Strategy are people already in employment.

But ‘most illiterate and semi-literate adults are unemployed or informally employed. The danger of the Skills Development Act is that it could reinforce the gulf between an elite workforce and the mass of unemployed, while allowing the government to claim that it is addressing the issue.”

The government and the private sector are not the only role players in Abet, Rule says. ‘The NGO sector, which carried the torch for literacy work during the era of apartheid, has been decimated by the funding squeeze over the past 10 years.”

Despite this, NGOs retain ‘a core of highly capable practitioners and an invaluable fund of experience which should be properly untilised” — as should community-based organisations ‘in integrating literacy and development at a local level”.

Rule argues that Abet is a constitutional right, and his paper outlines several strategies for engaging with the government.

‘We’re now consulting with organisations in the field,” says the ERP’s Salim Vally, acting director of Wits University’s Education Policy Unit, ‘considering the paper’s strategies, and will work out a course of action”.

In the ERP’s discussions with community organisations and individuals, ‘there has been constant reference to Abet”, Vally says. ‘And a number of NGOs and Abet experts approached us about the lack of government support. As with the ERP’s other focus areas, we will work with social movements and community organisations to take up violations of constitutional rights and put them on the agenda.”