Right to education: an insider’s perspective
THE past year has made the rights enshrined in South Africa’s Bill of Rights more relevant than ever before.
Prior to Covid-19, many of us simply took the right to freedom of movement for granted, as well as the right to freedom of trade, to health care and to education. Although these rights are experienced to greater and lesser degrees by South Africa’s citizens, we never imagined that a pandemic would force their realisation to be temporarily suspended for all.
The one-year anniversary of the pandemic this month, with Human Rights Day, has forced me to think of the ways in which education has evolved from a human rights perspective over the course of my career. Here is what I have learnt in the past 25 years.
When Media Works began in 1996, the demographic we worked with was very specific. The learners completing our adult basic education and training (Abet) programmes were mostly black men in their forties who had previously had little or no access to education. Few women attended our courses because they still weren’t part of the formal employment sector.
I’ve always felt the profile of our learners is indicative of the ways in which the right to education was being exercised. In those early years, the aftershocks of apartheid were still being acutely felt.
We were the first and only company providing computer-assisted training for adults. We went to remote areas to train workers in the mining and agricultural sectors using what, at the time, was the latest technology.
At the start of the new millennium, the sector training and education authority (Seta) system started to gain momentum. These Setas prioritised adult education across various sectors and fundamentally changed the way we worked. We were invited to train up to 15 000 people at a time through our multimedia programmes.
It was during this time we made our Abet level 1 material available in all 11 official languages and also, through funding we received from local government, in Braille and sign language. If anything defined this era, it was the government – in collaboration with the private sector – living up to providing education for all.
Towards the end of this decade, we also released Accelerate, our flagship product intended to fast track the Abet process for learners who had found it slow and poorly managed in the past.
The years 2010 to 2020 were about developing and improving online learning and, ironically, our ability to make our online content available offline, too. While technology improved dramatically, we found South Africans were hamstrung by the high cost of data, hence the demand for data-friendly and offline content.
By now, we were also noticing that only were our learners younger and more evenly balanced in terms of gender, they also had a stronger academic starting point. This meant the basic education they were receiving at school was vastly superior to what it had been for learners during the apartheid years. The right to education, formally expressed in the Bill of Rights in 1997, was bearing fruit.
Working in South Africa’s education sector for a quarter-century has taught me that the right to education is being borne out. Quality remains the abiding issue, and there are gaps to fill, but the ways in which the educational sector is evolving are encouraging. Here’s to the next 25 years.