The state doesn’t care
THIS YEAR, the government announced it had achieved the UN Millennium Development Goal on education, which required it to ensure all children are at school, completing a full course of primary education.
The MDGs – which range from halving extreme poverty rates to halting the spread of HIV/Aids, all by the target date of this year – are a blueprint agreed to by countries and leading development institutions around the world.
Important among them is providing universal primary education. After all, this is the agreedupon bedrock of our future success. But our government didn’t seem to be telling the truth when it made its MDG announcement on learning.
As you’ll see on our opposite page, it seemed to have excluded more than 500 000 children with disabilities, who are either unable to attend school through social and economic circumstances, or who are excluded from schooling due to administrative misalignment with policy.
That’s a nice way of putting it. The truth is that neither national government nor its agencies in the provinces and at local level appear to be in sync with the image it wishes to put out there – of a progressive, interested, compassionate state which wants all its children to succeed.
We’ve already seen how hundreds of thousands of children without disabilities are being let down by inadequate facilities, poorly resourced schools and the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statements (Caps) system, which in many cases compromises teaching through merely ticking boxes.
Yet, the “at least” factor applies, in that most able-bodied children are in classrooms of some kind. That can’t be said for the disabled, despite the fact that many of the children who aren’t at school have disabilities that should be easily accommodated, and for whom treatment in order to get them behind a desk is accessible.
It’s shameful. It’s yet another indictment of a system that claims to support the Bill of Rights but doesn’t seem to be able to enact its provisions.
How many little lives are being utterly wasted because of the state’s inability to care properly?