Education in SA gets some Gentle urging

LEONARD Gentle has urged the public to contribute towards bettering the state of education in South Africa.

Gentle delivered a pre-khutbah lecture at the Claremont Main Road mosque yesterday, focusing on the #FeesMustFall movement that has gripped the country for the past two years.

During his speech, the former teacher and social activist underlined three key points: free education, de-colonisation of education and organisation to improve the system.

Gentle said that in recent years the government had been cutting subsidies to all universities while introducing a system of loans through the National Student Financial Aid Scheme.

“This system has not worked and has been a source of fiction for many years.”

Speaking about the recent protests, Gentle said free tertiary education doesn’t have to come at the expense of other public priorities if the wealthy are made to pay more.

“Free education means that the state would have to direct resources from other social needs,” he said.

“At the moment the poor in our country subsidise the wealthy. This sounds radical but can lead to the opposite outcome, the poor will be discriminated against.”

On the de-colonisation of education, Gentle mentioned that many critics of the students have latched on to this demand that students don’t know what they want and that this sounds like laziness and “dropping standards”, with some critics having gleefully distributed the tweet from a student who said that science should be dropped because it was Western.

“But, as we know, human knowledge has come from all corners of the world and the sciences are not ‘Western’ but the product of Arabs, Europeans, Africans, Mayans and Chinese,” said Gentle.