Rationalising Education, or Trashing it?
Formulating plans to attack the basic problems in education in South Africa is not a new phenomenon. For most of this century the oppressed have wrestled with the countless obstacles that have formed part and parcel of schooling for non-citizens. The struggle has grown to be part of a nation-wide battle for liberation - for full citizenship rights. But at the same time the ruling class did not for one minute relax its determination to intensify the racist, debased education systems forced upon the unfranchised. Nevertheless, the progressive political and educational struggle taught the oppressed one vital truth that had to be learnt among many others. That was the fact that the struggle for democracy in education was bound up with the struggle for political and economic freedom. Moreover, it became only too clear that the huge measure of change and development would have to take place at the same time as massive economic progress got under way.
Recent political changes have gelled in the form of a particular brand of neo-colonial political governing structures. The task of restructuring education - if that is indeed on the agenda of the government of national unity - has been placed in the hands of a team led by Professor Sibusiso Bengu. If one is to judge by the frequent, often conflicting, policy statements coming from that direction there must be the greatest concern among educators for the fate of generations of pupils, students and teachers upon whom reforms are to be inflicted.
Some immediate problems centre on the recent retrenchments of thousands of teachers. These teachers were desperately needed to extend teaching facilities to hundreds of thousands of pupils who are either not at school or need the services of experienced, qualified teachers to upgrade the quality of their education. And now there are plans afoot not only to retrench even more teachers but also to close down training colleges or to reduce by some fifty percent the number of first-year students to be accepted for teacher-training. In another area turmoil was created in the technikons and training colleges and in the "ethnic" universities at the beginning of this year
At least three factors lay behind this chaos. The sick economy of this country has resulted in student fees rising to ridiculous levels. Vast numbers of post-Std 10 students were allowed into tertiary institutions in a non-selective fashion. And, thirdly, the dead hand of Christian National Education of the Eiselen - de Vos Malan brand was heavily felt upon several of the institutions. Not only were there language-medium problems with admissions. The choice of careers and subject courses had long before been bedeviled by the racist, debased curricula dominating most of the schools of the oppressed.
Today it is fashionable, and idiotic beyond ordinary logic, to refer to students for decades battered by racist CNE schooling as "previously disadvantaged" persons. This suggests that they are no longer disadvantaged under the fraudulent neo-colonial socio-political creation set up after the April 1994 elections. It is the selfsame type of wordplay and self-deception that drives the Bengu education team to believe that education reform can be based upon economic and political foundations which, if anything, are worse than ever before in t he most important respects.
In one vital area - that of the economics of South Africa - untruth and fiction trudge side by side with the Walter Mitty - type schemes that Minister Bengu and his army of directors-general, special advisers and ill-advised functionaries have announced from time to time. On the one hand there is a clear indication that the Education ministry and other ministries are incapable of grasping the problems with which they are confronted. On the other, there is their equally clear unwillingness to face the raw facts of South Africa's problems in education in relation to simple economics.
In the early stages the then Chief Director in Planning claimed that a five-percent increase in the education budget, spread over five years, would ensure equality of services for all South Africa's schools, colleges and universities. A decade before that researches by bodies such as the Independent Development Trust would have declared such a claim to be sheer nonsense, as indeed it was in 1992 when it was made. The fact is that massive injections of funds will be necessary to make any sort of impact upon an education system that has been rotting away in a society driven under segregation and apartheid into rapid decay. Besides this lunacy the country has had to face a whole body of fiction regarding the national budget and the funds set aside for education. In brief, in the current financial year some R31.8 billion has been allocated for education. The shortfall on the State budget revenue side equaled this amount. On top of this however the most recent studies by the Union Bank of Switzerland set this country's foreign debt at no less than R110 billion, on which the interest payment alone will amount to R13.2 billion. Our misery does not end there. Increasingly the most profitable South African companies are shipping their investment funds out of the country to all four corners of the world. In addition to all this the World Bank (WB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have imposed upon the country stringent conditions for it to qualify for the loans which the Ministers of Finance and of Trade and Industry have been begging for for a very long time.
Under the unwritten Structural Adjustment Programme dictated for South Africa these conditions are: that the government cut down on the number of civil servants in health, education and social service departments; that the people no longer get free services but should pay for them to reduce the State's budgets in these fields; that State-owned operations like Telkom and Eskom should be sold to capitalist investors to raise funds to reduce budget deficits or finance such operations as housing and job creation; and that foreign investors should be free to move their capital in and out of the country at will.
It is within the framework of such economics that the Bengu operators are attempting to work. No mention is made by the myriad of directors and advisers of just who ultimately holds the purse-strings in the South African economy. Most of the truth is wrapped up in the way in which the system of capitalism and its main agents the World Bank and the IMF operate. Not a word is ever spoken of the role of imperialism. Instead the education planners muddle on sacking teachers to conserve funds and, contrariwise, employing hordes of extra bureaucrats which waste our money getting, not earning, inflated salaries for holding bi-weekly forums to extend a mental fog throughout the educational world.
At another level there is a great deal of double-speak to mask reality. The Model C school system has been claimed to be a major obstacle in the way of desegregating schools and a drain upon State funds. Thus far that is true. But there is no way in which by simply changing the set-up in the relatively small number of Model C Schools the vast majority of under-staffed, under-equipped and generally deprived schools can be adequately provided for. The arithmetic of this sort of situation has been completely misread by the present lot of "educators". To target real or imaginary segments in the present system - the cumulative result of decades of discrimination, debasement and chaos - is to miss the wood for the trees.
Closely allied to this game of "blind-man's bluff" is the determination of the retarded arithmeticians to work upon teacher-to-pupil ratios of 1-35 and 1-40 in the secondary and primary school staffing arrangements. It is a matter of fact and a matter of raw everyday experience that such class sizes are the worst enemies of effective teaching and learning. It is also a known fact that if such arithmetic is used to dictate the number of teachers in a school the classes will never be 35 or 40 in size. They will turn out to be the grossly overcrowded classes against which the entire teaching profession has rallied for decades. Such calculations are mindless; but they assume even worse implications when they are used to prove that there are too many teachers in our schools and that further retrenchments are justified as are the plans to close teacher colleges and/or restrict the numbers of first-year admissions.
It is very pertinent to mention one most recent aspect of planning for teacher-training. The Minister declared in October that bursaries would be granted only to 1996 first-year students who intended to pursue courses in Mathematics, Science and Technology. On the surface this seems like a realistic response to a crying need in the profession. But reality is a harsh teacher. For it is another of those frightening facts that fewer than one percent of Std 10 candidates present themselves for Mathematics and Science and even fewer pass those subjects. Of those who do a very small percentage enters the teaching profession. It would not be unkind to suggest that the Ministry knows this - but finds this new scheme to award bursaries yet another means of saving its meagre resources.
The demand for polytechnics and technological education has been on the agenda of progressive teacher organisations' demands for more than half a century. In that same time the demand for increased efforts to promote basic number skills and scientific knowledge has been loudly and persistently made. The ruling class promoted this among the citizens, but it denied the sons and daughters of the oppressed the basic primary and secondary education that must of necessity underpin the tertiary education that must in turn underpin the industrialisation of society. The present ministry now finds itself "proudly" presenting a scheme to start somewhere in the middle with remedying the shortcomings in our ailing education system.
It is abundantly clear that it is impossible that those three aspects of social reconstruction - the political, the economic and the educational - can be advanced each in isolation from the others. The present ministry's educational warp and woof are the harsh realities of the South African economy and politics, rooted in the country's colonial history and now in the neo-colonial horse-deal that parades under the title of "the new South Africa". That identity remains. Neither the education ministry nor any of the other ministries controls the economics and politics of this country. They all operate on a running chain to look after the interests of those who do. For as long as this situation persists we will be burdened with stubborn problems in the process of overhauling education and with "remedies" worse than the diseases that assail pupils, teachers and parents.
