Reverend JJ Scholtz is creating an Oklahoma utopia in Mpumalanga’s agricultural heartland of Ermelo and plans to churn out gangly-legged cowboys and cowgirls armed with lassoes, chaps and the Bible. ‘If you look at what makes the United States the great nation it is today, it all goes back to the grass-roots principles of the […]
If there’s one thing the students at Sommersle Combined will know by the time they’ve left school, it’s the many hardships and obstacles that are thrown their way on a daily basis. This farm school, outside Harrismith in the Free State, is one of those that seems to have been left behind. Started in 1949, […]
Livhuwani Mutsharini insisted on being allowed to go to school, despite its being in deep rural Venda, Limpopo, with no facilities for disabled children. ‘We just have to live with the situation. It’s almost impossible to change,” says Edith Mikosi, principal of Mikosi Primary School in Gondeni village near Thohoyandou. The children use pit toilets, […]
When you look into the beaming face of any of the happy children at Tsoga O Itirele, a school for the mentally disabled, it’s difficult to understand why anyone would be afraid of them. Some of the children here were found wandering the street, dirty and half naked, because their parents didn’t know how to […]
Since January 2001, a ministerial project committee, about 150 educationists representing all stakeholders and a team of administrative staff have been involved in the production of a National Curriculum Statement (NCS) for Grades R to 9 (General Education and Training). The NCS specifies learning outcomes and assessment standards for each learning area on a grade-by-grade […]
No new curriculum is yet in place for next year’s Grade 10 learners. Nor has there been any teacher training at this level, and no new textbooks and other support materials have been developed. Teacher unions and other educationists express bewilderment and frustration at the national Department of Education’s (DoE) paralysis on the matter. ‘The […]
The 15 kilometres they had to walk every day to get to school is a thing of the past, with the opening of Mngazi School last month. The 10-classroom building, which includes a 500-seater multipurpose hall, a workshop and an administrative block, was built with funding from Absa Foundation in response to a request made […]
‘The teachers love me, the children love me. Some of the children were worried they would get Aids from me, but some of the others told them Nkosi is a gentle little boy, he will not harm you.” These are the words of Nkosi Johnson when asked in a radio interview whether he liked school. […]
In fact, it’s a normal public school called Jules High School, located in the fairly run-down suburb of Jeppestown, east of Johannesburg. But these unusual facilities do make it a school with a difference: among the subjects offered here are hotel-keeping and catering, and tourism and travel. One of the educators responsible for teaching catering, […]
It takes just 10 minutes to bake a loaf of bread using tin foil and the energy from the sun. This was demonstrated by Debora Hammann and Claudette van Wyk, Grade 7 learners from Barberton Primary School. Their project, which showed the use of energy-efficient solar and biogas technologies through the use of scientific principles, […]