Education in the doldrums

Nearly 900 students attend the high school in Orlando, a suburb of Johannesburg's sprawling Soweto township, but there is only one qualified teacher to teach the three basic science subjects, the library has no up-to-date books and the 'computer lab' has no computers. The classrooms contain few educational tools and facilities: some tables and chairs are scattered around each room, a blackboard and the odd poster hang on the walls. According to principal T.B.G. Mchuna, the state-run school has received no new furniture since 2002. Orlando High, the school many of the 1976 Soweto uprising's student leaders attended, is struggling to educate its pupils. Thirty years ago they rejected the government's decision to make Afrikaans the language of tuition because it was associated with apartheid and the students feared it would entrench second-class education. Their resistance reignited the liberation movement. Despite more than a decade of democratic government, the school's pass rate in the national matriculation exams for three of the last five years was less than 50 percent. In South Africa today, 65 percent of whites aged over 20 have a high school or higher qualification, compared to only 14 percent of blacks. "We have a lot of problems," admitted Mchuna. "There are continual issues with books, teachers and fees, which makes the running of the school difficult. The teachers are underpaid, so they leave; the library books are old and from America, Australia and New Zealand - they hold little relevance to our students." The 30th anniversary of the 1976 student revolt that cost the lives of up to 1,000 pupils will be marked on 16 June, yet young black South Africans still feel the need to protest against the quality of education. Anecdotal evidence of the difficulties and challenges facing poor students at government schools, particularly in rural areas, is widespread. A chronic lack of qualified teachers, poor infrastructure and extreme poverty make learning a significant challenge. According to the educational research unit at Witwatersrand University, 43 percent of schools in South Africa have no electricity; 27 percent have no running water; a staggering 80 percent have no library. Most worrying of all, the researchers estimated that around 50 percent of students who start school in South Africa do not finish high school, leaving many poor black youths severely disadvantaged in an economic system that increasingly demands high educational standards from its work force. Education minister Naledi Pandor maintains that every effort is being made to rectify the situation: in the last 30 months 179 schools have been built, and this year alone the government has set aside US$1.5 billion, or 21 percent of the national budget, for education. "It is a massive infrastructural programme but it has not addressed all our needs, because apart from the kids who were schooling in the open, you have kids schooling in some very dangerous structures," said Pandor. "These were classrooms built from mud by communities that have a desire to educate their children, but do not have the means."

Interview Minister of Education Naledi Pandor [ Listen]

But change is not happening fast enough for people like Jackson Rahlala, 20, a student activist with the Anti-Privatisation Forum. "We have protested against school fees, corruption, and against the expulsion of students from school because they cannot afford books," he said angrily at his home made from sheets of corrugated iron in Soshanguve, an impoverished township north of Johannesburg. "The poor children are still getting a poor quality of education, just like it has always been, so we must do something about it. If you are very poor the school fees are meant to be free, but some principals expel students who cannot pay," he remarked indignantly. Critics of the current education policy believe the ANC is failing to deliver due to the combination of apartheid's legacy of inequality and the actions taken by the incoming government to restructure the education system post-1994. The low numbers and poor quality of teachers is a key area of concern. "A lot of teachers were trained during the apartheid years, so they themselves received poor education," said Shireen Motala, Director of the Education Policy Unit at the University of the Witwatersrand. "The education system needs a long-term plan. Five years ago a number of teacher [training] colleges were closed down following a period of [teacher] retrenchment, when many teachers left the system after being offered severance packages," she noted. User fees, set by school boards, has further entrenched inequality. They effectively create a two-tier public system where parents who can afford it send their children to schools charging higher fees - almost exclusively formerly white-only schools - which attract better teachers and are better equipped. "Those who were previously privileged and the newly privileged, who are mostly black people, are able to use private finances to enhance the quality of what is offered, while the poor black majority do not have the financial means to improve the quality of schooling. So you have inequality within a public system, essentially, which derives from the apartheid legacy," said Pandor. South Africa's curriculum, introduced in 1999 and amended several times since then, has also come in for heavy criticism; damned as unsuited to the needs of a developing country with an unofficial unemployment rate of 40 percent and poor linkages between education and the job market. "Initially it was filled with jargon, very complex and unusable as a tool of education. It was revised because of this and, while it is much better, it still has problems. It calls for teachers to develop their own material, which is a good thing, but they don't have access to library material and they are not properly trained," said Salim Valley, a senior education researcher at Witwatersrand University. "It also works best in small classes that operate under continuous assessment. In South Africa you don't have small classrooms - this is why we have seen a backlash from parents and students in the townships about the curriculum," he explained. "The big worries are the dwindling amount [of pupils] going on to grade 11 and 12, and the decline in the amount that go to university or can find work in the job market," said Motala. "Even if they pass, what happens afterwards?" Vally used the phrase "a push-out" as opposed to "a drop-out" to describe what happened when a child abandoned the education system, saying it reflected a broader set of problems, such as poverty, illness or the perception that education would not necessarily improve their chances of finding employment. According to Vally there are "tens of thousands of people that pass their exams but are unable to get jobs - pupils see the example of those that haven't been able to find work for 10 years - their motivation goes, and they resign themselves [to the situation]".