Rural schools are alienated from their communities and play no role in local development, according to preliminary results of a groundbreaking research study.
The research is being conducted by, among others, the Centre for Education Policy Development (CEPD), founded a decade ago as the African National Congress’s education think tank.
One of the key findings of the research is that ”the education policy community does not understand the problems of rural education or the relationship between education and development in poor rural areas,” said CEPD director John Pampallis at the 10th anniversary celebrations of his organisation this week.
Pampallis said the education policy community, which includes the CEPD and the government, does not take into account rural communities when making policies. ”We assume that what’s good for urban people will be good for rural people,” he said.
Among the disturbing insights revealed by the research, which has not yet been released, is ”a picture of schools as alien institutions in poor rural communities, institutions which have no relationships to the potential development of those communities”.
Teachers and principals very often do not live in the community in which they teach and therefore do not identify with it.
This is common practice, Pampallis acknowledged, ”Partly because schools in rural areas, like on farms, are built on communal land and teachers cannot own land; and also because those schools are in very poor areas and teachers could be looking for better places to stay.”
The project is an initiative of the Nelson Mandela Foundation, and is one component of the foundation’s Rural Schools Development Programme. Makano Morojele, project manager at the foundation, said the findings would help to deal with educational and developmental problems encountered by rural communities.
”We would like to know the communities’ experiences in education and poverty and how that has influenced their understanding of education,” said Morojele. She said this includes the experiences of learners, parents and teachers.
Morojele said that despite a number of studies that have been conducted on rural education there is still no comprehensive understanding of how rural poverty has shaped the experiences of communities and schooling.
One of the revelations of the research is that parents cannot play the role in school governing bodies that the South African Schools Act has assigned to them — because of a deficiency of skills and confidence.
But, said Pampallis, more training for both parents and principals can solve this problem. ”We have to ensure that principals are trained to work with school governing bodies, because cooperation is needed.”
The project will release its report by the beginning of December. The research, jointly conducted by the Education Policy Consortium (EPC) and the Human Sciences Research Council, is aimed at understanding the context of poor education in poor communities and giving voice to those communities.
The EPC includes the CEPD, the education policy units at the University of the Witwatersrand, Fort Hare University and the University of Natal, and the Centre for Education Research Evaluation and Policy, based at the University of Durban-Westville.
The project, which started in January, involves nine communities in Limpopo, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
Kim Porteus, who is leading the project from the EPC side, said there are 18 schools involved in the participatory case study done by her side and 150 in a survey by the Human Sciences Research Council.
Porteus said the nine communities involved were chosen because the level of poverty there was most serious and there were signs of extreme education deprivation. ”Many of them are farm schools and schools in the rural areas of the former Bantustans.”
”The research will present voices of rural communities,” said Morojele. ”Many studies that have been conducted present the voices of academics who did the research rather than those of rural communities.”
A key area of this research is the implications of policies on rural education. In what may lead to help for rural education, Morojele said the research would identify whether there is a difference in the ways urban and rural schools are affected by policies: ”Do policies affect rural schools the way they affect urban schools?”
Morojele said that the report will aim to promote community dialogue around the findings. ”We will go back to communities through community indabas and talk about what the study has found,” she told the Mail & Guardian. ”This will be a platform for communities to identify their priorities and see how they can deal with challenges that face them.”