[Image: X / @GovernmentZA]
At the Bana Pele Early Childhood Development Leadership Summit on Monday, President Cyril Ramaphosa dropped a jaw-dropper: admitting past failures in education reform, he suggested that all schools should have been closed for two years to re-educate teachers properly.
“Yes the children would have run around the streets without any education for 2 years but that would have gained us a lot of time to be able to reform our education system.”
South Africans wasted no time roasting the idea, per IOL:
@Lady_Bee: “CLOSE PARLIAMENT FOR 2 YEARS. SEND ALL POLITICIANS TO SCHOOL TO LEARN , HONESTY, INTEGRITY, COMPLETE THEIR STUDIES, NO MORE FAKE QUALIFICATIONS.”
@ShawdyBrowns: “Honestly, they should have thought of this during lockdown.”
@Marianne: “His so-called solution is not well thought out at all. Who thinks of these things? Ridiculous. He wants to cripple the economy even more. How he became wealthy other than corruption is a mystery.”
@Mrs_J: “I still want my salary and housing allowance and increase each year for those two years.”
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But beyond the banter, Ramaphosa’s speech set political analysts and education unions off, who argue that education in black communities has actually gotten worse since democracy in 1994.
Ramaphosa claimed the legacy of Bantu Education still haunts South Africa today. He even wrote in his weekly newsletter:
“One of the most damaging effects of Bantu Education was the deliberate neglect of black children when it came to the provision of foundation years learning. One study published in 1992 found that during apartheid only 6% of black children had access to quality ECD programmes, compared to one third of all white children.”
Since 1994, South Africa has cycled through multiple curriculum overhauls – Curriculum 2005, the National Curriculum Statement (NCS), and the current CAPS system – but according to analysts, these efforts have failed to close the gap.
Instead, schools remain plagued by inequality, violence, vandalism, corruption, and crime. Outside the schooling spaces, unemployment, poverty, xenophobia, robbery, GBVs, and different forms of crime have characterised South African society.
Political analyst Sandile Swana put it bluntly by saying education in black communities has deteriorated, noting that parents -including politicians – send their kids to private and former Model C schools, escaping the mess they created in township schools.
“Also, they have not been clever enough to ensure that the youth are exposed to suitable libraries, technology centres and laboratories. The parents, including the comrades themselves – the ANC and all the elite in parliament – are taking their children to former model C and private schools in order to benefit from the traditions of high-quality education that were established by white communities. They are running away from the consequences of the foolishness that they have been doing in the black schools, townships and villages,” said Swana.
He also slammed the abolition of teacher training colleges, arguing that it damaged teaching quality:
“They also fiddled with the basics as to what must be taught in class, and they came up with all kinds of complicated systems of education that have proved not to be effective,” said Swana.
The Basic Education Department, however, insists progress has been made. Spokesperson Elijah Mhlanga cited a report showing that learners today perform better than they did 20 years ago. However, even that report admits that South Africa still lags behind other middle-income countries.
If improvements of the kind seen over the two decades preceding the pandemic can be sustained, the country’s indicators of learning outcomes could match those of successful middle-income countries as early as 2030, the report states.
Meanwhile, Professor Sethulego Matebesi argued that government efforts fail to address real problems, where historical injustices shape contemporary realities.
“There seems to be little interest in dealing with the inexorable situation where schools have become violent and an avenue for rampant corruption.”
The National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa)’s Basil Manuel blamed the government’s obsession with matric results and post-schooling, instead of fixing preschool and junior primary education:
“Had we fixed the bottom, the top would have sorted itself out. I think the priorities were not right. It is not about not enough energy and investment. It is about the priorities and this has seen a lot of people making use of Model C schools because they offered smaller classes,” said Naptosa’s executive director Basil Manuel.
Sadtu’s general secretary, Mugwenya Maluleke, pointed out that parents send their kids to Model C schools because they actually have infrastructure. Meanwhile, black children are left behind.
“The destruction of black communities was systemic and to address this ocean divide, requires financial resources coupled with mindset change across the board,” he said.
Speaking of kids; while Ramaphosa’s own family keeps a low profile, they definitely weren’t spending two years “playing in the streets”:
- Tumela Ramaphosa – Master’s in International Business (Hult International Business School, San Francisco).
- Andile Ramaphosa – Bachelors in Accounting & Statistics (UCT).
- Keneilwe “Kiki” Ramaphosa – Bachelor of Architectural Science (UCT), Master’s from Columbia University.
- Mashudu Ramaphosa – Studied at UCT.
So, while the rest of South Africa’s children were supposedly meant to roam the streets for two years, the Ramaphosa kids were busy collecting degrees. Make it make sense.
[Source: IOL]
