Enriching young minds through reading books
ANY SOLUTION to the country’s chronic crisis in basic education has to be sustain- able.
That is why civic-minded corporations throwing money into projects like building and equipping computer labs, donating vehicles and even establishing feeding schemes, while they may catch the eye and give the company involved some of the good corporate citizen recognition they are looking for, will never make much of a difference in the long term.
There’s no question that those sorts of activities are the responsibility of the government. The provincial departments are allocated budgets, funded by the taxpayers, and they have a long-established network of regional and district officials who have the ability to oversee the rehabilitation of the system, right down to the most remote rural areas on a scale that single philanthropic organisations could never do.
The departments of education have a constitutional duty to serve everyone, and their presence is permanent. They will be there long after the corporates and NGOs have moved on to other ventures, or lost interest because the person who was championing this particular cause has left the organisation.
That’s not to say that there is no good work being done. Of course every bit helps and it would be crazy to begrudge a needy school any assistance it gets, even if the help is only of a temporary nature.
I recently was part of a big social media dissemination of a message that went along the lines of what we all remember from our days at school are teachers, not teaching techniques or physical equipment. The teacher is at the heart of the process.
And the head of the teachers in any school is the principal. Poor leadership and management is to blame for poor education to a bigger degree than inadequate funding and lack of infrastructure is.
In fact, good leadership will find ways to increase the money available, or at least to use what little there is more effectively.
This was driven home to me recently when we visited Somelulwazi Primary School in Freedom Park, Soweto, to see the school’s new library, built and stocked by the Shout SA organisation – the initiative led by singers Kabelo Mabelane and Danny K out of funds raised by their Smile online song sales.
Shout chooses the schools at which these libraries will be installed carefully, aware of the fact that if they are just put up and left, they will be ineffective at best, and used for all sorts of inappropriate purposes at worst.
So they look for sustainability, and that translates into schools that are well led. A school with a good leader will have the correct systems in place, and teachers who are motivated and hard working.
That, they say, is the sort of place where they will build a library.
Somelulwazi is such a place and it came as no surprise to discover that the school’s principal, Sifiso Ntshangase, is part of the Partners for Possibility (PfP) programme.
PfP, in short, pairs principals of schools with business leaders in a structured one-year programme during which the business person guides and advises the principal on how to operate the school along accepted business lines, and learns a lot of lessons about leadership and community involvement from the principal, in the process.
Ntshangase’s partner from the world of business is Gail Walters, an independent business consultant, coach and mentor who has a wealth of corporate experience.
She was there when we visited the library and explained how they are busy exploring ways to raise the funding to put a qualified, full-time librarian into the facility.
“To be really effective we need someone who will run it professionally,” she explained. “Apart from the logistics, there needs to be a reading programme, assistance with projects, and it needs to be available to the surrounding community.”
So, it has become yet another project that Ntshangase and Walters are tackling jointly. They have been doing these sorts of things for close to a year now, and even though their partnership will officially end soon, Walters can’t see herself going anywhere soon. “Well, now I have to stay at least until the library is working properly,” she says, “and I’m pretty sure that by then something else will have come up that we need to deal with.”
Shout SA and Partners for Possibility are two outstanding examples of the sorts of private sector initiatives that will get us out of our educational mess.
Partners for Possibility is looking for business people who would like to get involved. Contact them at pfp@symphonia.net. Visit their website http://www.pfp4sa.org.
You can download Shout SA’s Smile by sending an SMS to 40388. Downloads cost R20.