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/ 24 September 2010
Archbishop Desmond has added his voice to calls for the University of Johannesburg to sever academic ties with Israel’s Ben-Gurion University.
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/ 17 September 2010
Students incensed by apparent privatisation plans at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) were due to continue protests on Thursday and Friday.
After global rankings last week put only one SA university in its top 200 — UCT — a second set of rankings this week also singled out UCT.
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/ 15 September 2010
The first National Book Week suffered a strike-induced hitch on Monday when attendance of school children dropped dramatically on its final day.
"I want to declare now the end of the season of summits," said Blade Nzimande in his closing address on Friday to the skills summit in Gauteng.
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/ 10 September 2010
In an unprecedented move, the Northern Cape education department has scrapped matric prelim exams for the class of 2010.
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/ 10 September 2010
Labour and business must unite to meet the country’s human resource development imperatives, said Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe on Thursday.
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/ 9 September 2010
It is "bizarre" to call for the scrapping of Setas, said Higher Education and Training Minister Blade Nzimande on Thursday.
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/ 9 September 2010
As teachers trickled back to work after their strike was suspended on Monday, unions looked to be heading for a showdown over the no work, no pay rule
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/ 3 September 2010
The <i>M&G</i> Literary Festival will feature a tense discussion about widening post-apartheid education inequities.
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/ 2 September 2010
The DA has questioned the department of basic education’s ability to ensure that the no-work, no-pay rule for striking teachers is enforced.
Weekend discussions between UWC and NSFAS have left the university "hopeful" that its fees crisis could be resolved before the end of September.
As government prepares to dock the salaries of striking teachers, an <i>M&G</i> investigation suggests the data necessary to do so could be flawed.
Exclusively Afrikaans universities would disastrously imprison white students in single-race and monolingual environments, warns Jonathan Jansen.
At a rugby match I watched on Saturday afternoon this past weekend, three young people seated in front of me caught my attention for a few minutes.
The constitutional right of all children to a basic education is being violated by teachers going on strike, the Democratic Alliance said on Tuesday.
The department of basic education says schools were open on Tuesday, but urged parents to consider their children’s safety during the teacher strike.
Storm brews in the academic teacup over authorship of a book about the creation of the university.
Rumours of outcomes-based education’s death this week were not so much exaggerated as stupendously belated.
Johannesburg’s metro police met the organisers of a march against education inequalities this week and have approved the march.
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/ 14 November 2007
‘We must now build the Africa of our dreams and stop expecting others to do it … You can’t build a society entirely on assistance." This exhortation came from Joseph Okpaku, president of the Telecom Africa International Corporation, based in New York. He was speaking two weeks ago in Tripoli, Libya, at the Association of African Universities’ (AAU) huge two-yearly conference.
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/ 11 September 2007
Among the many charges that will forever stick to the apartheid government is that its repression of oppositional voices robbed the country of some of its richest intellectual and political resources. The British government has been one of the fortunate beneficiaries of South African-born talent: one of those forced to leave the country in the 1960s was Peter Hain.
Bureaucratic sloth or unwillingness to apply the law is slowly strangling a number of schools in Gauteng. Now some are taking legal steps to force the Gauteng education department to do its job.
Following landmark legal action in June concerning school fees, the education department has revealed it is now working out how to compensate schools for fee exemptions. The larger issue of free education was discussed at the ANC policy conference at the end of June.
The governments "no fee" policy has set alarm bells ringing at the country’s poorest schools, with some of them finding that they are now even poorer.
Schoolteachers played starring roles in Trevor Manuel’s recent budget speech suggesting a welcome change in official thinking about how education funding can achieve quality.
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/ 24 November 2006
The government this week successfully fended off a court challenge to school fees regulations intended to protect poor pupils and their parents. Seventeen well-funded public schools in KwaZulu-Natal brought an urgent application in the Pietermaritzburg High Court last Friday to halt implementation of the government’s new regulations on exemptions from payment of school fees.
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/ 20 November 2006
On my arrival at the University of KwaZulu-Natal recently, one academic commented on "how frightened people are to speak". I soon discovered this for myself. Some academics apologetically withdrew from agreements to meet; others insisted that our meetings be off-campus, writes the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>’s David Macfarlane.
Education Minister Naledi Pandor and KwaZulu-Natal Education Minister Ina Cronje have been targeted in a landmark legal challenge aimed at protecting poor parents and pupils.
The Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) has protested to University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) vice-chancellor Malegapuru Makgoba about a "severe decline" in academic freedom and a "climate of fear" on the UKZN campus. Na’eem Jeenah, head of the FXI’s anti-censorship programme, was reacting to the bringing of disciplinary action against sociology academic Fazel Khan.
<i>We Remember Differently</i> is an exceptionally moving treatment of major South African preoccupations: race, identity, memory, desire, love, eroticism, women’s domestic and social entrapment, mothers and daughters. This short film will provoke rich debate, suggests David Macfarlane.
Severe governance upheavals at the Durban University of Technology (DUT) have prompted the intervention of Minister of Education Naledi Pandor. But some members of the DUT council fear the minister could dilute or even halt a forensic audit into alleged financial irregularities, and possible fraud, involving more than R150-million.