Fears have been raised that the poor state of some school and public libraries will have a negative impact on the ability of learners to cope with the new matric exam that comes into effect this year.
The national senior certificate, which replaces the old matric, encourages reading, but learners and teacher representatives in the Western Cape and Gauteng say this is stymied by limited library facilities in disadvantaged areas. When learners find their school libraries inadequate, they turn to public libraries, only to find these are of little help.
The National Professional Teachers Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa) Western Cape chairperson, Mogamad Gasant, said lack of resources in local libraries would have an impact on the matric results.
Gasant, a teacher, said he had 300 learners who, when given an assignment, would all be trying to get their hands on one book on the relevant subject at the local library.
Learners who had computers and internet connections at home were ”always ahead” of their peers while ”disadvantaged learners remain disadvantaged”.
One such learner is Khayelitsha matric pupil Masixole Dake, who said the school he attended did not have a library and he was forced to use the Masakhane public library in Khayelitsha. But Dake said books were invariably unavailable, making it difficult to work on school assignments. Internet terminals were always overcrowded.
In Gauteng, Naptosa chief executive officer Mike Myburg said schools in most disadvantaged areas of Gauteng had ”no resources in their libraries and rural students have nothing whatsoever”.
He said lack of resources in school libraries and public libraries had ”impoverished education”. ”Learners cannot access educational resources beyond the textbooks they are supplied with,” said Myburgh.
He said many schools did not have adequate library facilities and in many cases they did not have any library at all. Schools which had libraries found it difficult to allocate funds to stock their libraries with books and other resources because of inadequate funds. Municipal libraries were also not able to buy enough new resources to help learners.
While the education department is responsible for school libraries, the arts and culture department is responsible for public libraries. Chief director of libraries Dr Graham Dominy said funding for public libraries had been a problem for the past six to seven years. But he said the national treasury had since given the department a three-year grant of R1-billion, to run until 2010, to address the problem.
This would be transferred to provinces in the form of conditional grants that could only be spent on libraries.
”The problem is not as bad as it was last year,” he said, adding that a public library was there to support the information needs of all in the community. As such, it could support school libraries, but ”it can’t do more than that”.
Education department spokesperson Lunga Ngqengelele confirmed that lack of resources in school libraries has been a problem ”for a long time”.
He said it was the responsibility of provincial governments to ensure that schools had adequate resources. – West Cape News