South Africa’s Minister of Education Naledi Pandor said the poor quality of public education in Africa’s economic powerhouse will threaten future growth if not corrected.
”We have to redouble our efforts in quality of education,” Pandor said on Wednesday in an interview with Reuters. ”It’s not just a budget issue but a quality improvement programme … If we don’t address it there will be problems with growth later.”
South Africa’s economy has boomed over the past few years but the government wants even higher growth to tackle widespread poverty and unemployment.
Pandor highlighted a skills shortage among graduates — especially in engineering and information technology — as a particular cause for concern but pledged to double the number of students studying vocational courses by 2008.
Education officials were recently stung by a South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) report that berated the government for failing to honour its commitment to deliver quality education for all citizens.
The country’s Aida epidemic also was cited as a prime factor for a ”crisis” in the school system, according to Sadtu, with 12,7% of teachers infected with HIV and about 10 000 in need of immediate antiretroviral treatment.
”How do you save education from this chaos?” Sadtu boss Thulas Nxesi said, calling for school spending to be raised beyond its current 6% of GDP. ”You have to spend more to level the playing field.”
But Pandor rejected the call to increase spending, insisting that it was more important to improve how money was spent.
Class divide
The government has been accused of neglecting public schools, particularly those in poorer predominantly black townships, including Soweto, the huge township south of Johannesburg.
A number of schools are scheduled to close in Soweto as parents try to place their children in schools with better resources, the Star reported last week.
The class divide that marks education in South Africa is also a hangover from the apartheid era, which enforced policies that prevented black pupils from attending the best schools.
”I think desegregation is happening amongst children. You have some white schools that are now 50% black pupils. But I am dissatisfied with the level of [black] staff,” Pandor said.
While separate education has been eliminated in democratic South Africa, the impact of those policies still lingers.
Twelve years after the end of apartheid, some estimates say up to 12-million South Africans, mostly poor and black, are illiterate although Pandor said her department put the figure at closer to 8-million. — Reuters