Maintaining its tradition of constructive dissent, the Mail & Guardian brings together three people who disagree on a lot but concur that we need to keep talking urgently about widening post-apartheid education inequities and the system’s continuing slide into crisis.
Cynthia Kros regards with horror the government’s recent declaration that schools will ‘go back to basics” — a fundamentally anti-intellectual slogan, she says.
A former schoolteacher herself, she is now a professor in the school of arts at Wits University.
Professor Sipho Seepe is well placed to consider how tertiary ivory towers might have contributed more than coolly detached analyses to the present crisis.
An academic himself, with a PhD in physics, Seepe, a former president of the South African Institute of Race Relations, used to be acting vice-chancellor of the former Vista University.
This was so torrid a crucible of the merger process that gave us 23 tertiary institutions instead of 36 that it vaporised and disappeared into the then unwelcoming high-pressure system of the Rand Afrikaans University — now the University of Johannesburg (UJ).
Salim Vally could bring us up to date on that clash of climates: he is now a senior researcher at the UJ’s Centre for Education Rights and Transformation.
With degrees from York University in Canada and Wits, he has also worked as a literacy tutor, schoolteacher and trade unionist.
Vally agrees with Howard Zinn that ‘most academics publish while others perish” and so still pursues his dream of linking academic scholarship with societal concerns and community participation.
As these three, who are among the most outspoken, original and independent thinkers about politics and education in South Africa today, battle it out, I will try to keep the peace — but I won’t try too hard.
David Macfarlane, M&G education editor, will chair Session 4: The ABCs of RSA — So where to, education? on Saturday September 4 from 2.30pm to 4pm. Panelists will be Cynthia Kros, Sipho Seepe and Salim Vally