Category Archives: education

The education crisis: Call in the people

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http://www.ppen.org.za/

The education crisis: Call in the people

As usual at this time of the year, there has been a sudden spurt of analyses, discussions and scenarios about our education system. Some of these are symptomatic of the annual matric exams-related national itch. This year, some of them are undoubtedly related to contests between political parties positioning themselves for next year’s general election. And yet we believe that something even more important is taking place – as South Africans we are sensing more clearly the depth of our crisis in education. And we are realising that education should be placed on the national agenda as a priority item.

A bleak future?

Every South African citizen who knows that the future of this country ultimately depends on the health of the education system has come to realise that at this moment, we have no future. This is so because of the fact that the system continues to stagnate and even to regress in crisis mode, in spite of all well-intentioned interventions by government and other interested parties.

By way of reminding ourselves of the depth and the extent of dysfunctionality of the system, a few examples must suffice. Behind these, there is a veritable archive of statistics and other data that demonstrate in brutal detail just how bad the situation is.

Very many of our children – especially in the impoverished rural areas and townships – go to school hungry. They are by definition unable to learn effectively.

The majority of our children are not learning to read and write confidently in any language. The culture of reading, which is the foundation of any modern nation, is confined to a thin layer of privileged people.

Too many schools are unsafe, bleak, uninspiring places where violence and abuse are rife.

Teachers and their students are too often traumatised, demotivated and merely going through the motions. Schools as learning spaces, where opportunities exist for experiencing the joy of learning, exploring, experimenting and achieving, are few and far between. Where they do exist, they are to be found mainly in established suburban, former White areas.

In most other cases, schools are no more than dumping grounds where parents hope the teachers will cope with their offspring as best they can. And, indeed, given class sizes and other anti-educational factors, many teachers are no less than miracle workers!

79% of our schools do not have libraries and 60% do not have laboratories.

60% of children are pushed out of the schooling system before they reach Grade 12.

If you dropped out before completing Grade 12, your chances of employment are not significantly higher than someone without any schooling.

Teachers are the most important group of professionals in any society since everything else depends on their dedication and effectiveness. Yet the quality of teacher education and professional development, as well as the levels of support for most teachers, are grossly inadequate. So much so, indeed, that 55% of those in the profession would leave it if they could.

30 000 teachers in fact do leave the profession annually, while only 7 000 enter it.

Crux of the problem

The long and the short of the crisis is that we have a two-tier educational system in South Africa, one for the children of the rich and another for the urban and the rural poor. Schooling is based on middle class norms – such as literate parents, homes with some books and newspapers, daily access to English, and homes with long standing confidence in discussing school work with children. The majority of our children who come from other kinds of families and homes are doomed to fail and to be frustrated. The consequences can be seen everywhere in our streets and in our prisons. We need to address the social inequality which is at the root of this phenomenon, inter alia by creating the supportive environment and providing the inspiration, the leadership and the resources that all children need to benefit from their schooling.

What can we do?

We have to call in the people, do again – and even better – what we did under apartheid. We have to make education into a people’s affair. Communities, especially working class and other poor communities, have to become directly involved in looking for immediate ways out of the crisis. Government and educationists have to engage the people in open, public, transparent processes where the issues are canvassed in detail and social contracts between relevant arms of government, educational institutions and the relevant communities are entered into. Schools of education at universities should place the engagement with poor communities at the top of their list of research and development priorities, and government as well as other organisations with resources should see this as worthy of public investment.

The Department of Education should institute a national commission on restoring quality education immediately after the 2009 elections. Such a commission should not consist merely of ‘experts’ and an army of consultants. It should, like the poverty hearings, involve all communities over a period of at least 18 months and issue interim reports and recommendations until it can produce a final report on a well-considered and realistic programme for the radical transformation of the system as a whole.

Immediate actions

Three issues should receive immediate attention: improving the quantity and quality of teachers in the system, especially in the primary school, improving the availability of quality learning and teaching resources for all learners and educators and, above all, instituting a corruption-free compulsory nutritional scheme co-delivered with, and accountable to communities, so that even the poorest child is given at the very least the chance to attend school on a full stomach.

We are engaged in weaving together a network of educators and other interested people to launch an initiative to come together, across differences, to mobilise for education – sensing that our future depends on urgent and wide public participation in education. We believe that all those who are serious about salvaging our proud educational heritage and building on it for the liberating future we held up to our youth and our people in 1994, will want to be part of this non-party political network and educational movement.

We stand at the proverbial crossroads. We either take the road that goes around in a long detour only to come back to where we are now – in crisis; or we take the direct, if difficult, road to the kind of education we want for our children and other members of our society equally in need of educational development. It is only if we have the courage to do this that we can build the kind of South Africa for which we have fought so long, and for which we continue to struggle.

We believe that the choice is crystal clear.

Signed by: Neville Alexander, Ivor Baatjes, Nhlanganiso Dladla, Andre Keet, Nobuntu Mazeka, Nomsa Mazwai, Enver Motala, Kim Porteus, Brian Ramadiro, John Samuel, Salim Vally.

Mercury: Neglecting the law, failing the poor

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http://www.themercury.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=4836392

Neglecting the law, failing the poor

February 11, 2009 Edition 1

Imraan Buccus

ONE of the guarantees of our celebrated constitution is that every child has the right to education. In order to secure this right in practice, the law stipulates that fees should not be charged for any child who is an orphan or in foster care, for any child whose guardians receive a state grant or a pension or for any child whose guardians earn less than 10 times the annual school fee.

Yet every year grassroots organisations report that this is a very difficult time of the year for poor families. Despite all the laws and policies that protect the right of all children to access schools, they are unlawfully excluded every year because their parents can’t pay fees. Allegations of racist exclusions also remain common.

Often parents are coerced into paying fees that they simply cannot afford, with devastating consequences for the general well-being of their households. There are also regular reports of parents being forced to come into schools before they go to their jobs to do cleaning work in lieu of fees. And when children are accepted into schools, when their parents haven’t been able to pay the full fees, there are regular reports of children being humiliated and punished for their parents’ poverty.

There certainly are cases where school principals and governing bodies simply do not want poor or African children in their schools. In these cases the failure of the state is one of omission – a failure to clamp down on the bigotry that is often present in state institutions, like some schools and some police stations.

Violated

But there are also many cases where principals and governing bodies have no particular animus towards the poor, or towards Africans, but simply cannot run their schools with the money allocated to them by the government. In these cases, schools that are struggling to buy chalk and pay electricity bills and so on have no viable alternative other than to extract resources from struggling families.

One of the reasons why the government is able to get away with self-aggrandising recklessness while basic needs, such as the right of each child to a decent education, are not taken care of is the widespread failure to implement laws and policies that protect the poor.

It is true enough that we have one of the best constitutions in the world, but it is equally true that it is violated by state and private power every day. Most of the time, people subjected to these kinds of violations simply don’t have the resources to seek legal redress. And when they do get to court they find that the judges in the local courts are not always sympathetic to constitutional values or, in one notorious case, even willing to stay awake, while the poor argue their case. A fair hearing is guaranteed in the Constitutional Court but who has the resources to access the highest court in the land?

The failure to ensure that no child is excluded from school on the basis of their parents’ poverty is just one instance of a general failure to implement legal and policy protection for the poor. Readers of The Mercury will be well aware that international human rights organisations have long argued that in South Africa poor people routinely face unlawful and often violent, apartheid-style, forced removals and that the protests of poor people’s organisations are regularly unlawfully banned and subject to unlawful police violence.

This radical difference between the law, on the one hand, and social reality, on the other, is creeping into more and more aspects of our society. For instance, now that local police appear to have top-level sanction to kill at will, we seem to have a situation in which our constitution rejects the death penalty while there is de facto consent for extrajudicial state murder.

Oppression

One consequence of the radical difference between the laws and policies and the lived reality in our society is that it has now become grossly irresponsible to deny the difference between state principles and state practice. For too long, when academics or social movements have raised concrete issues about specific rights violations, politicians have replied with lists of laws and policies. The laws and policies may be commendable but when they are not implemented they offer no alibi for oppression.

If we are to think seriously about our society we must start with the lived reality of life in our society. And that lived reality is one in which the children of the poor are excluded from schools each year.

We need to face up to this reality and we need to support the heroic non-governmental organisations and social movements that quietly take up this battle year after year.

Laws and policies are important, but for too long there has been far too much academic and civil society attention on law and policy and very little on the reality of how these are actually implemented. It is time for some serious support to be invested in the often entirely unfunded and volunteer-driven organisations that are doing more than anyone else to protect the values of our constitution on the ground.

Once Again Our Children Are Being Evicted from Schools

Abahlali baseMjondolo Press Release
Friday, 6 February 2009

Once Again Our Children Are Being Evicted from Schools

Every child has a right to a decent education. Every child has a right to dignity in school. These principles are not negotiable.

Abahlali baseMjondolo has a yearly calendar. The last struggle of the year is usually against evictions because Christmas is always the worst time for evictions. Every year the first struggle is to get our children into schools. Before the movement was formed each family waged this struggle alone. Since 2006 we have run an annual back to school campaign. We run workshops informing people of their rights, we provide parents with fee exemption forms and help them to complete the forms, and we negotiate with schools and school governing bodies. We have to confront all kinds of discrimination against poor people and we have to confront racism. The first challenge is to get our children into schools. The second challenge is to ensure that our children are treated with dignity once they are in the schools.

There are laws and policies that are there to secure the right of all children to access schools and to be treated with dignity in schools. But, just as with the right to occupy land unlawfully without arbitrary evictions, and the right to march and speak freely against the government, these laws and policies are usually just ignored when it comes to the poor. Some principals – like some police officers, the land invasions unit, politicians and even some lawyers at the legal aid board seem to believe that the poor are beneath the law.

The first problem at our schools is that poor people can’t afford to pay the fees or to buy uniforms and stationery. Some schools will not accept children without fees, money for text books, a full set of stationery and full school uniforms. Some schools demand that fees are paid for the whole year instead of by term.

At the primary school in Motala Heights in Pinetown lots of children from the shacks have been turned away and the secretary won’t let their parents speak to the principal. When they asked to meet the principal security drove them away. The security often chase poor parents and African parents away. In Motala Heights the schools only go to grade ten and this year when the older kids went on the bus to the high school in Wyebank the people in Wyebank stoned the bus and pulled the driver out. The driver took the children to Wyebank and then brought them back. He was threatened not to return to the area with the children from Motala Heights.

In KwaMashu the high school in Castle Hill refuses to take the children from the shacks. When the poor parents ask for fee exemption forms they are told to ‘top up’ the exemption with R300 a month. Here the issue is not race – it is just a question of class because every one is African.

Shack dwellers in Joe Slovo (Durban) are facing the problem that the wealthy parents at Chatsworth High School have dominated all the meetings and so the issues of fees and safety are influenced by the rich parents. The same thing happens in Motala Heights. There the poor parents did attend the meetings of the School Governing Body but the principle looked so badly at the poor parents and always put them down. This is why the poor parents stopped attending the meetings.

This issue of money has created conflict between communities and teachers. We recognise that the government is highly irresponsible and wastes hundreds of millions of rand on luxuries like stadiums but fails to give schools enough money to pay teacher’s salaries, buy chalk and books or pay water and electricity bills. We recognise that this is not the fault of teachers. Where ever possible we will work to unite communities and teachers and principals to work together to pressurise government to give enough money to schools.

We know that teachers are under pressures in other kinds of ways. Sometimes teachers have to be security guards as well as teachers. We are happy to support the teachers with these kinds of problems so that they can focus on being teachers.

However some teachers, secretaries and principals are exploiting the good will of communities to force the poor to pay what the government should be paying. It is easier to intimidate and bully a poor person than to stand up to the government. But this is not right.

In some schools poor parents are forced to come in and clean the schools because they cannot afford school fees. In some schools the children are humiliated and punished because their parents cannot afford school fees. In many schools the end of year results are not released to families that have outstanding fees. This forces many families to use all their December money, often also borrowing, to pay their debts to the schools. They then have to spend Christmas with nothing.

Children are often excluded from schools because their first language is not English.

Some children don’t have parents and therefore don’t have documents. It often happens that even if we get a letter from social workers to say that they are undocumented orphans they are still not accepted.

Some children don’t have documents because of the xenophobia of the Department of Home Affairs. They can also be refused access to schools.

However the law clearly states that no child can be denied access to a school on the basis of race, class, or language. The law clearly states that it is the principal’s responsibility to facilitate access for every child. It is illegal for a principal to ask for a registration fee to secure a place for a child, to withhold results for fees, to humiliate or punish children whose parents have not paid fees or to make parents who cannot pay fees to clean the school.

The law clearly states that orphans cannot be charged fees, that foster parents are exempt from paying fees, that everyone getting a grant or pension is exempt from paying, that schools must make provision for children whose parents can not afford stationery, and that schools cannot charge loan fees for text books.

The law clearly states that parents who earn less than ten times the school fees for a year do not have to pay anything and that parents who earn between ten and thirty times the school feels for a year can get a partial fee exemption.

In all the areas we are encouraging the poor parents and, where there is a problem of racism, the African parents to attend the school meetings. We recognise that parents are often afraid to attend meetings after being humiliated by secretaries and chased away by securities in the past. Therefore we work to build the courage of parents against hatred of the poor and hatred of Africans. We do this by showing parents that they are not alone and that together they can be strong.

When the principals show this hatred we always start by trying to educate them about the laws and policies that protect the rights of the poor. We always start by trying to negotiate. But when principals refuse to obey the law and refuse to respect poor people and African people we will march on them and picket their schools. We will report their behaviour to the Department of Education and when necessary we will take them to court.

In order to prepare ourselves so that we can lead our leaders we need to educate ourselves. We are fully aware that education does not stop at the school gate. We all need to keep learning all the time. This is why we always try to get our members into adult education programmes. This is why we always strongly support the Socialist Student’s Movement in their struggle for free university education.

But we also need to learn independently of forms of education that are really teaching us to know our place in the world. As a movement that is moving out of the places in which the poor are supposed to be kept, and moving out of the order that the poor are supposed to obey, we have to think for ourselves. This is why we started our own library. This is why we started the University of Abahlali baseMjondolo where we have formal classes and graduations and where we also create places to think, together, about our lives and our struggle. Everyday we learn together through discussions about our struggles. Right now, as another school year starts, we are relearning the lesson that as the poor we are still foreigners in our own country. Just as we are driven out of the cities and into government shacks in rural human dumping grounds our children are driven out of the schools.

As Abahlali baaseMjondolo we stand firm for the right of every child living in South Africa to access decent education without regard to the financial status, race, language or country of origin of their family. This principle is not negotiable.

All parents who are having problems with accessing their schools, or with ensuring the dignity of their children in schools, or who need to get fee exemption forms or who need help in completing the fee exemption forms can contact:

Abahlali baseMjondolo: 031 269 1822

The Education Rights Project: 011 717 3355

The Paulo Freire Institute: 033 260 6186

For more information or comment on the ongoing and illegal evictions of poor children from government schools please contact:

Ivor Baatjes, Paulo Freire Institute: 033 260 6186
Shamita Naidoo, Chairperson of the Motala Heights Abahlali baseMjondolo branch: 078 224 5441
Zodwa Nsibande Abahlali baseMjondolo General Secretary: 082 830 2707
Mazwi Nzimande, President of the Abahlali baseMjondolo Youth League (and grade 12 learner): 074 222 8601
Britt Sable, Paulo Freire Institute: 033 260 6186
S’bu Zikode, Abahlali baseMjondolo President: 083 547 0474

SSM: Protest For Free Education on 8 September 2008

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SSM has supported every Abahlali march from the beginning. SSM has been beaten, tear-gassed and shot at with Abahlali. Abahlali fully supports the demand of SSM that education not be run as a business and that all education should be free. Education should be a right for every person and not the privilege of the rich. Abahlali will be supporting this protest by SSM. Abahlali salutes SSM, who are students inside the university, for supporting the right of people outside to education.

A CALL TO ACTION FOR DECENT FREE EDUCATION FOR ALL
INVITATION LETTER

The Socialist Student Movement (SSM) is making a call to action for free education against the background of a year of protests at institutions of higher learning, culminating at the closure and beginning of the academic year. Financial exclusions, triggered by exorbitant annual fee increments, academic exclusions, shortages of accommodation, of resources necessary for learning and teaching and of qualified educators have pushed students into battles where they have been faced with brutal state repression, with shootings at for example Wits and the University of Johannesburg.

The wave of protests has highlighted the reality of exclusion that goes through the entire education system. At tertiary level, thousands of, mainly black, working class students every year face financial and academic exclusion. The Education Minister, Naledi Pandor, recently expressed concern at the number of students who drop out before they graduate. But in addition, the greatest exclusion is of those who never enter the universities’ gates: many of those who finish matric are denied entrance to higher education and fill the ranks of South Africa’s eight million-strong unemployed ‘reserve army’ of labour; for a number of reasons, including the unaffordability of fees and the pressing needs of mere survival but also the stringent entrance requirements – introduced by the now ‘corporatised’ higher education institutions as a ‘cost reduction’ measure. But moreover, less than half of school learners make it through to their matric year.

In spite of many promises by the government and the ruling party, including the unfulfilled promise to put an end to learning under trees by 2006 – many schools, not least the 14 000 so-called ‘no fee schools’ that are supposed to constitute 40 percent of the country’s schools, still lack the necessary material and human resources for meaningful learning. In KwaZulu-Natal alone, there is a shortage of 10 000 classrooms and about 700 schools are without water and proper sports facilities, amongst other things. To upgrade these basics R30 billion is required, while the department has a budget of just R1, 2 billion for the financial year 2008/2009.

While the Constitution guarantees everyone the right to education, the reality is that education has become a commodity. The best education available costs the most. In the backdrop of the problems, undermining the right to learn, faced by public institutions, those parents who can afford to opt for private education, an element of which exists also within the state’s schools as wealthier parents add school fees to fund extra teachers, equipment etc. The result is the steady deterioration of matric results, down to a 65.2% pass rate last year from 66.5% in 2006, to which the government’s main response is the conscious dilution of the quality of passes.

While not providing specifics, the Zuma-led ANC has also acknowledged the situation needs urgent intervention. In its traditional January 8 statement, the new NEC makes fresh promises regarding ‘free education’ – calling for 60 percent of schools to be declared ‘no fee schools’ by 2009. Some student and youth organisations aligned to the ruling ANC-led Tripartite Alliance have also called for ‘free education’. Again, no details as to how this will be achieved are given.

In the context outlined above, the ANC’s ‘no fee’-version of ‘free education’ (on which the government spends about R3 billion a year) amounts to mere consolidation of the class divide in education, with the children of the poor confined to impossible conditions of learning and a preparation more for unemployment, violence and humiliation than skilled participation in economy and society. The no fee schools experience huge problems of even worse poverty than before. This policy is part of the government’s attempts to dish out alms to the poor with the left hand to cushion the effects of the right hand’s facilitation of big business’ extraction of wealth. Real free education has to be for all, with the same high quality for all!

The Socialist Student Movement therefore reiterates its call for decent free education for all and proposes to all genuine, struggling, organisations of students, youth, our parents in workers- and community organisations, the mobilisation for a national Day of Action for Free Education on September 8, 2008 which is World Literacy Day. Trying to make links with workers, whose rights to decent working conditions and a living wage are also being eroded, will be crucial. The SSM is joined in this initiative by the Democratic Socialist Movement.

Contrary to what the government wants us to believe, the failure to provide decent, free education is not due to unavailability of resources, per se, but the misdirection of the available resources. The government itself is with religious zeal implementing market-orthodox policies while heavily subsidising business through for example special below-cost electricity prices, projects such as the 2010 FIFA World Cup, Gautrain, the corrupt arms deal and the environmentally destructive Coega Development Project. The funds poured onto such projects could go a long way in eradicating the problems in the education system as well as in wider society, not to mention the scandalous budget surpluses which Trevor Manuel aims to keep running until 2010 at the least.
But moreover, the vast majority of SA’s wealth is not even touched by government but pocketed by private individuals. For example, Anglo American, which is said to own about 70 percent of the SA economy, announced a profit of R59 billion for 2007, two thirds of which it claims to draw from its operations in this country. BHP Billiton made a R6 billion-profit. This is built on the exploitation and marginalisation of workers and working class people just as SA capital was historically built on the blood and sweat of mineworkers, the starvation of their families in ‘reserves’ and ‘homelands’ and the explicit racist and sexist structures permeating all of society. Apartheid may be gone, but the economic dictatorship of (still overwhelmingly white) capital is doing better than ever.
A mass-based campaign for free education is needed to take up the fight for these resources that could sustain free education and other basic services such as health care, housing, water and electricity. We hope that you will join us in this campaign. The picketing would be stage outside the City Hall Library upon Anton Lembede Street ( Smith Street) commencing at 12h00 ends at 14h00.

For more information contact:
Percy Ngonyama 084 4580184 (SRC Member Howard College UKZN)
Bongani Nzama 084 8047516 or e-mail socialiststudent.mov@gmail.com/ socialiststudent@webmail.co.za