The latest war is on, like background music, on TVs and radios in all corners of the world. It’s high drama, reality TV with enough fly-encrusted corpses to turn the head of even the most dumbed-down couch potato. I’m not one who can watch it for long. I soon find myself scowling with the effort […]
Imagine this: a farmer wearing a pair of rubber boots and dirty overalls climbs into a tractor. The engine starts and the farmer drives away to fetch her kids from school. So how many of you had to make major adjustments to your mental picture when you found out that the farmer is, in fact, […]
It’s little wonder that it’s taken more than a decade to arrive at a draft policy on the place of religion in education. So prickly and emotive is this realm of human experience that the final policy will only be publicly released next month. The policy-makers need to be congratulated on the sensitivity they have […]
One of the words that come to mind when I think ‘teacher” is long-suffering. The demands of the job seem relentless and increasing; the rewards, few and far between. There’s a very strange mismatch in our world between the acknowledged importance of educators to creating a functioning society and the status they are given. Everybody […]
Assessing the Department of Education’s (DoE) performance this year is no straightforward business. One thing the DoE definitely gets a positive mark for, though, is its launches. With practised pomp and fanfare, it gets the message across very clearly that its newest project or body is significant. Three that stand out this year are the […]
Last month’s performance in the streets of Johannesburg has reinforced the fact that Congress of South African Students (Cosas) has neither the organisational skills nor the leadership to direct its membership in a positive direction. Marches take a lot of effort and know-how if they are to be a lawful and successful demonstration of dissatisfaction. […]
If I was one of the matric Class of 2003, I reckon I’d be pretty peeved. There I am, pleased as punch with how well I’ve done to cross that mighty hurdle that everyone and their mum had said I had to cross since I was six, and suddenly there is a general public uproar […]
The cries of cultural ‘purists” are horribly reminiscent of the narrow-minded dogma so readily trotted out by religious fundamentalists. In the view of these purists, on the same day the world was created, so were the traditions and expressions of their culture. Some say their cultures burst forth fully formed from a holy egg; others […]
The year is 1974. The apartheid State has just set up its free family planning programme, with one of its explicit aims to curb the population growth rate among blacks. Among other methods, the state encourages the coercive use of the injectable contraceptive Depo Provera among young black women studying for matric and black women […]
One of the interesting sides to working as an education journalist is that there is hardly anything that is not of relevance to my beat. From a hoola-hooping contest to national budgets or the onset of war in distant lands, everything has either relevance to, or influence on, the processes of learning and teaching. The […]