Date: 06/11/2003
Source: Ministry of Education
Title: Asmal: National Teaching Awards


NOTES FOR PROFESSOR KADER ASMAL, MP, MINISTER OF EDUCATION, NATIONAL TEACHING AWARDS, Presidential Guest House, Pretoria, 6 November 2003

Deputy President, Mr Jacob Zuma, thank you very much for making yourself available for this fourth annual National Teaching Awards celebration. I am proud to report to you that our celebration tonight is the culmination of nine very successful and well-organised provincial award ceremonies.

Therefore, as we bestow these national awards, we are also recognising the participation of many people - in local communities, school governing bodies, teacher unions, and provincial administrations - who have enthusiastically embraced this opportunity to honour talented, dedicated, and inspiring teachers.

I would also like to thank the MECs, the Heads of Departments, and the provincial co-ordinators for heeding our call to recognise and reward excellence in the teaching profession. In the spirit of Tirisano, these National Teaching Awards prove, once again, that we are truly working together.

The Deputy Minister, Mr Mosibudi Mangena
Director-General, Mr Thami Mseleku
Honoured guests from teacher unions and school governing bodies
Representatives of the South African Council for Educators, The Education Labour Relations Council, and the Education and Training SETA
Representatives of Higher Education Institutions
Sponsors
And, of course, our deserving provincial awardees

I greet you all this evening.

It is a great pleasure to host all of you as we pay tribute to our teachers. While recognising the accomplishments of each of these individuals, we also know that each teacher is an integral part of a community. A teacher is not merely one important strand in the social fabric of a community; a dedicated teacher is actively engaged in weaving that social fabric, strengthening and deepening the quality of social ties that make a viable community.

As I have said, we are honouring talented, dedicated, and inspiring teachers. Their talent and dedication is evident in their skill and professionalism, in their discipline, hard work, long hours and enduring commitment to enabling and empowering the learners in their care.

But what does it mean to be an "inspiring" teacher?

To be "inspiring" might be similar to displaying what the great sociologist Max Weber called "charisma", a special gift, a "certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he or she is set apart from ordinary people and treated as endowed with exceptional powers and qualities".

An inspiring teacher might very well have special qualities, as the great public intellectual Edward Said put it, for enabling learners "to achieve moments of insight, acts of interpretation and, above all, sustained performances of the humane and critical understanding that can ennoble and emancipate human beings". Or, put differently, as a Grade 1 pupil described her inspiring teacher, Agnes Maphela, a previous recipient of a Teaching Award, "She teaches us to pray and count, and read and laugh".

Certainly, these are special gifts, "exceptional powers and qualities," as Max Weber defined charisma, but they do not set the teacher "apart from ordinary people". Rather, the exceptional power of these gifts is only realised in the ordinary, every day exchanges between people, within the constant cycle of giving, receiving, and giving again, in which teachers do their work on behalf of our children, our communities, and our nation.

Tonight's recipients of Teaching Awards are grounded in our communities, sharing the conditions of our people, yet they demonstrate excellence on a daily basis. As South Africans, we can share in their accomplishments, because these are the achievements of our entire country.

We might call this "ordinary heroism", the ongoing work that teachers do, in the words of the Irish author Fintan O'Toole, "to make this country a land fit, not for heroes, but for the courage and dignity of ordinary men and women living their daily lives in peace and freedom". Tonight we honour our teachers for their gifts, for their giving, and for their "ordinary heroism" in building our nation.

As we approach the close of our first ten years of democracy, we are taking stock of our progress in education. What have we achieved? Our celebrations tonight reflect many of the gains we have made in the ongoing struggle for an inclusive, high-quality educational system.

These gains have not been achieved through miracles, but by the hard work and commitment of so many people, at school level, and in the districts, who have managed the complex human process of school integration. These gains have been won by people embracing the ideals of democracy, transparency, and accountability - and making those ideals a reality.

Certainly, there has been controversy along the way, but we have built a national consensus on educational transformation. Although we debate the details of outcomes-based education, we generally agree on working within this framework for quality education. Although we argue about the terms and conditions of university mergers, we have generally agreed on the need for restructuring and rationalisation in higher education.

So, we have made progress in building an inclusive education system, not only by expanding access, but also by including people in the process of public debate and decision-making.

In our current efforts to improve access to education, we are working on the implementation of White Paper 5 on Early Childhood Development and White Paper 6 on Inclusive Education. This year we will provide 240 000 children, aged 5, and mostly from poor rural and urban areas, with a pre-school year. We will also develop 30 "full-service" primary schools, which will be equipped to take in children with special needs who would otherwise have been excluded. We are undertaking these measures in the service of our constitutional imperative, which establishes basic education as a right, and in keeping faith with the promise of the Freedom Charter, adopted at Kliptown in 1955, in which ordinary South Africans affirmed that the doors of learning should be open to all.

As part of our implementation of the White Papers on early childhood and inclusive education, I am pleased to announce that tonight we are recognising excellence in two new categories, Early Childhood Development and Special Needs Teaching.

Recently, I attended the conference of Commonwealth Education Ministers in Scotland. The Commonwealth countries are home to 1.7 billion people. Despite their diversity, these countries work to establish a common sense of purpose, which has important implications for education. While education ministers met, teachers from around the world, including a senior union official from South Africa, gathered in a Parallel Summit. Prominent on the agenda for those discussions was the issue of international teacher recruitment, which has resulted in an out-flow of human capital from developing to developed countries. Some small countries, with perhaps only 1 000 teachers, are badly affected. Of course, it affects us. We might have read the media headline, "South African teachers rescue London schools", with some pride - if we did not know that the United Kingdom was "raiding" South African teachers who were needed at home. Seeking to address this imbalanced educational exchange, we will be participating in the Working Group established to work out agreements on equitable policies and practices of international teacher recruitment.

Also in the international arena, the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) has identified education as one of the key instruments for mobilising human resources and skills for advancing human rights and human development in Africa. In South Africa, our co-ordinated efforts are required to realise the developmental potential of education. In the case of Sector Education and Training Authorities (Setas), for example, we have opened channels of communication between business, labour, and the marketplace, on the one hand, and service providers, especially public education providers, on the other hand, who are adapting their training accordingly. Since the "demands of the market" are constantly changing, we will need to keep these channels of communication open.

Deputy President, our teachers are precious human resources, scarce and valuable, who deserve our recognition but also our support. In securing quality basic education for our children, we must take most seriously the training of our teachers. Since the incorporation of the Colleges of Education into Higher Education, we have seen a greater sense of purpose and productivity in teacher education, with enrolments increasing this year, for the second year in a row, after a long period of declining numbers. As part of our strategy to develop the professional quality of teacher training and to enhance the dignity and status of teachers, I have appointed a high level Ministerial Committee to develop a national framework for teacher education. This framework will provide the basis to ensure that all South African children are taught by qualified, competent and caring teachers.

As we enter the next decade of our democratic society, our Second Freedom Decade, we are well aware of the enormous challenges we face. Our struggle to achieve a better life for all continues in the face of poverty, disease, illiteracy, crime, and other daunting challenges. In their contributions to weaving the social fabric of our communities, teachers are at the forefront of this struggle, giving their time, energy, and commitment to a range of crucial social initiatives.

In response to poverty, teachers make sure that families and children receive the social grants to which they are entitled and that learners are never excluded from education due to poverty.

In response to disease, teachers are essential collaborators in working out strategies and tactics to address the HIV and AIDS pandemic.

In response to illiteracy, teachers have been engaged in adult literacy projects, helping to reach over 1 million people over the past four years.

In response to crime, teachers have worked to ensure that the school, as the centre of a community, is free of drugs and violence, including the violations of human dignity that often bread social alienation and anti-social acts.

Although a teacher's role in promoting citizenship and serving the community is spelled out in the Norms and Standards for Educators, so many teachers, including those we honour tonight, have gone above and beyond this call of duty through their "ordinary heroism" both inside and outside the classroom.

As these teachers have proven, our schools can work. While I was in Scotland for the meeting of the Commonwealth Ministers of Education, the Scottish Minister spoke fondly of his visit to school that worked, a school here in Atteridgeville, Tshwane, which was regarded as a model school to such an extent that some schools in Scotland at followed its example!

But we would not do justice to the achievements of the teachers we are honouring tonight if we did not also acknowledge that we still find in our country schools in which inadequate facilities, dispirited teachers, and uninterested learners make education extremely difficult.

Working together, with dedicated teachers and loving parents, with local communities and the private sector, we are committed to making every school a model school. Our children deserve nothing less. Our award-winning teachers, who we honour tonight, have taught us, by their example, that we can expect more.

In conclusion, Programme Director, I would like to thank all the adjudicators, at provincial and national levels, for their efforts. Committing long hours and serious thought, they have made difficult choice. I will invite them up to make the awards so they can account for their decisions.

First, however, I would like to commend to you, Mr Deputy President, all the teachers of South Africa - all 350 000 of them. As we recognise tonight's recipients of the National Teaching Awards, who are leaders of their profession, we recall that they are models of the hard work and dedication of the entire teaching profession, a truly collective endeavour, since I am sure that each of the teachers we are honouring would say that they could not do their jobs without the help and support of their colleagues, principals, and communities.

As we celebrate these fourth annual National Teaching Awards, I urge us all to recommit ourselves to the essential work - again, a truly collective endeavour - of affirming and enhancing the dignity of the teaching profession. This year's World Teachers' Day, celebrated on 5 October, adopted as its theme, "Teachers opening doors to a better world". Certainly, this theme recalls our longstanding commitment in South Africa to open the doors of learning in the interest of a better life for all. A better life for all, of course, must also mean a better life for teachers. As we recognise the outstanding contributions of the recipients of the National Teaching Awards for 2003, we reaffirm our commitment to supporting all of our teachers in their ongoing work of opening doors to a better world.

I thank you all.

Issued by: Ministry of Education
6 November 2003