Two vital education sectors were inexplicably overlooked in this year’s Budget and the national Department of Education should explain its thinking in these areas, according to an analysis of the education budget released this week by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa).
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/ 13 January 2004
Leave the children alone! That was the main import of the Department of Education’s emergency press conference last week about the matric results. But, once again, the truth was hidden behind statistics.
The matric exam’s exalted status drew savage fire, even as the results were celebrated.
Education took a back seat in this week’s gala performance of that annual farce, the matric results (aka The Matrix Reloaded). However, given the continued failure of the country’s secondary education system to produce a generation of students that can meet the needs of the country’s economic and social development programmes, the farce is in fact more a tragedy.
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/ 15 December 2003
Intense turbulence simmered to a slow boil last week as UDW and the University of Natal waited to hear who will lead the merged institution. Two contenders were Natal vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba and massively controversial UDW head Saths Cooper. Late on Thursday the announcement was made – Makgoba, to the relief of concerned staffers at both universities.
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/ 7 November 2003
A treacherous minister of education, duplicitous and interfering government officials, a shoddy and compromised assessor, infantile members of the governing council, incompetent and self-serving senior managers, “Indian histrionics”, short-sighted academics, hostile students who might not even be students, sensationalist and trashy KwaZulu-Natal newspapers … All this – and a dash of “Hindu nationalism” to contend with too.
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/ 23 October 2003
Students entering tertiary study next year will walk into a higher education landscape vastly different from the one South Africa has known for decades. From January, familiar institutional names will cease to exist. Where before you might have enrolled at Unisa or the University of Natal or the University of Durban-Westville, you’ll now be registering at … Well, no one knows just yet.
Saths Cooper, vice-chancellor of the University of Durban-Westville (UDW), and deputy vice-chancellor Lionel Nicholas, received a R174 000 interim statement of account last month from an unregistered security company. The precise services for which the company charged remain unclear.
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/ 26 September 2003
Vista University is considering legal action against the minister of education — a move that could derail the massive national tertiary merger process due to take effect in three months. Vista accuses Asmal and the national Department of Education in writing of a ”clear and unacceptable abdication of responsibility”.
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/ 26 September 2003
The <i>Mail & Guardian</i> has done it again, and this time it is journalist Sam Sole who is bringing home the bacon. Hours after the <i>M&G</i> reported in last Friday’s edition that Wisani wa ka Ngobeni had won the news category of the Vodacom Journalist of the Year Awards 2003.