Filling two and half hours a week with an innovative arts and culture programme is a lot to ask of many schools. This is what the Department of Education’s (DoE) Revised National Curriculum Statement calls for. However, a lack of teacher training in the field of arts and culture and inadequate resources have hamstrung many […]
Initiation schools in Mpumalanga are still the sole responsibility of traditional leaders because the province has yet to enact legislation to regulate them. The province’s House of Traditional Leaders is currently drafting a policy on schools, which will eventually be passed by the legislature as law, says house representative Inkosi Mzingeli Mthethwa. ‘We’ve consulted with […]
As the world becomes a global village, many people are losing touch with their roots and some can no longer speak their mother tongue. But people who speak Sesotho sa Leboa, more commonly known as Northern Sotho or Sepedi, needn’t fear losing their language: it’s been captured in South Africa’s first online, bilingual Sesotho sa […]
An institution that’s been in the education game for more than 150 years has embarked on a journey to transplant its cultural roots from its colonial origins back into Africa. In 1849 Robert Gray, the first Anglican bishop of Cape Town, established Bishops College for proper Christian young men. Since then it has succeeded in […]
Marianne and Cornelius Cloete gave up their life in noisy Johannesburg suburbia and moved to a farm in Magaliesburg, the North West, in 1990. The move opened their eyes to the realities of rural living, and not all of them were pleasant. ”Coming from a place where schools are all over, we saw how children […]
There’s something joyous ringing in the air: the sound of 2 400 children from 169 schools all over the country marching through the streets in brass bands, accompanied by dancers, steel drums, African drums and marimbas. It’s a sound that has become a movement, building on the township tradition of brass bands. This is the […]
Cotlands looks, at first glance, like any other nursery school. Children clamber over a jungle gym; others splash paint over sheets of paper stuck to the wall. Bigger children pore over colouring books under the watchful gaze of a teacher. But if one of those children were to fall off the jungle gym and scrape […]
A multimedia satellite television network called Mindset has launched a TV channel focusing on mathematics, science and English and an educator development programme. Channel Activate, accessible on channel 82 of DStv, is targeting learners and educators in the Further Education and Training (FET) band and broadcasts nine hours on weekdays. Mindset Network is a non-profit […]
Judge Lucy Mailula of the Johannesburg High Court handed down judgement in October 2003 in an important case that had been argued before her more than a year before. The case, the first of its kind in South Africa to deal with issues concerning children with HIV and their right to attend pre-school, raised a […]
It is easy to fool yourself that the threat of HIV to teenagers doesn’t need to be addressed in schools with any urgency. There are no visible signs of this ‘silent†epidemic in the classroom. Compare it to the recent meningitis scare at Potchefstroom University: the health authorities sprang into action immediately. A highly contagious […]