Our apathy won’t help improve education system
Let’s be active subjects who get things done, writeseugene Daniels
E SAY our children matter and that education is crucial to the success of our country. When it comes to putting our money where our mouth is, we are sorely lacking.
Our government sourced money for submarines, planes and even stadiums. But, we don’t seem to care when it comes to providing running water and toilets for our schools. Something is rotten in the state of South Africa.
Every pupil in our country is entitled to a decent school building with sufficient classrooms, functional toilet facilities, a library, a science lab, connectivity, sports facilities, a school hall and water. But 19 years into our democracy we find that 93 percent of public schools have no libraries, almost 2 500 have no water supply, 46 percent still use pit latrines and 913 have no toilets.
Equal Education’s celebrated outof-court settlement with the education department forced the minister to publish the long-awaited normsby tomorrow. But experts say, the Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards for Public School Infrastructure standards published last week for comment, amounts to a large setback for basic education rights of our country’s 25 000 public schools.
It is easy to blame and shame our government, but we need to take some responsibility for the sad state of affairs. We elected our politicians and officials and need to find ways to hold them accountable more rigorously. That is a given in a healthy democracy.
We should have a strong civil society that is actively involved in the day-to-day affairs of our nation, through a range of structures such as community organisations, community safety forums, residents associations, school governing bodies, religious institutions, NGOs, and sport and cultural organisations. We should be praying for our nation, defending our civil liberties, writing to our elected representatives, giving our free time to coach soccer, feed the poor, read to those who have learning barriers and help our neighbour.
Instead, we choose to moan and groan from the comfort of our armchairs and, in so doing, we are getting the government we deserve. In the main, we are a nation of apathetic, disillusioned and reactive subjects. We rise once every five years to cast our ballot and then return to vegetate in front of our televisions for two to four hours a day. No wonder our politicians are having a party at our expense.
WWe need to shift gear and become active citizens who do things differently.
Three key challenges confronted us in education in 1994: a new curriculum was needed, our teachers had to be retrained to deliver the curriculum and infrastructure in our schools had to be upgraded. We succeeded in panel-beating our curriculum but did not do well with the training of our teachers or the upgrading of our schools.
Rather than retraining our educators, we have merely succeeded in orientating them to implement our new curriculum.
They need to be trained to implement the national department’s care and support programme so that they are able to personalise their teaching This means that they would understand learning barriers and be equipped to work with the learning style, multiple intelligence and unique strengths of each learner. This would reduce the drop-out rate, improve pupil outcomes and in so doing, give them an enhanced platform to excel at high school level and become productive citizens.
A recent Mckinsey Report on the world’s best schools recommended that our teachers connect the school to parents and community. That would ensure that parents become more involved in their child’s education and minimise the vandalism of our schools. Furthermore, they advised that we focus on pupil achievement, put our children ahead of personal or political interest and that we set high expectations for performance.
Our infrastructure budget should be designed to develop focus or specialised high schools offering subject packages linked to the strength-based career path of each pupil. This would go a long way to develop learners who are competent to fill more than 800 000 scarceskills vacancies. The schools would be equipped to work closely with industry in terms of its standards
THIS IS A CLARION CALL TO ALL CITIZENS TO SPEAK OUT ABOUT THE PLIGHT OF OUR CHILDREN
and needs. The successful Go for Gold programme with the construction industry illustrates that pupils attain excellence when they know where they are going and what is expected of them.
Cameron McConnachie, the legal representative for Equal Education, argues that the gazetted document for Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards for Public School Infrastructure is “an attempt to buy more time”. It does not stipulate any figures or quantities, such as the number of toilets required or the amount and type of power and water supplies relative to school size, nor does it give any implementation dates.
Equal Education’s general secretary, Brad Brockman, said the organisation had expected the draft to be “detailed and specific… and for them to have clear time frames for provinces to ensure compliance”. The draft norms and standards don’t do so. Instead, they say that in 18 months’ time the minister will release another document to give content to the norms and standards but that this document will be “guidelines”, not ‘‘ legally binding regulations”.
Millions of citizens, thousands of teachers and education officials should be telling the minister and the government that our children cannot be treated in this manner. School governing bodies, teacher unions, principals and parents should demand that they act to remedy this injustice within five years instead of dawdling for another 19 years.
We should remind our politicians and the government that they need to muster the same resolve when they sourced money for the Arms Deal and 2010 World Cup. Our children are far more important than these “imperatives”.
This is a clarion call to all citizens to speak out and demand that our government act decisively and assertively to address the plight of millions of our children.
The regulations relating to Minimum Uniform Norms and Standards for Public School Infrastructure can be found at http://www.info.gov.za.The closing date for comments is March 15 .
EugeneDanielsistheEducationConnectorfortheCitizens Movement(www.citizensmove ment.org.za).