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Date : 27/11/2005
Source: Department of Education
Title: Pandor: Sino-African Ministers of Education Forum


  Address by Naledi Pandor, Minister of Education, South Africa, to the Sino-African Ministers of Education Forum, Beijing, China

EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT AND TRANSFORMATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

The education and training system under apartheid was characterised by three key features. First, the system was fragmented along racial and ethnic lines, and was saturated with the racist ideology and educational doctrines of apartheid.

Second, there was unequal access to education and training at all levels of the system. Vast disparities existed between black and white schooling and large numbers of black people, in particular, adults, out-of-school youth and children of pre-school age, had little or no access to education and training.

Third, there was a lack of democratic control within the education and training system. Students, teachers, parents, and workers were excluded from deciding what sort of education they wanted.

The fragmented, unequal and undemocratic nature of the education and training system has had profound effects on the development of the economy and society. It resulted in the destruction, distortion or neglect of the human potential of our country, with devastating consequences for social and economic development. This was evident in the lack of skilled and trained labour and the adverse effects of this on productivity and the international competitiveness of the economy.

And more importantly, apartheid education and its aftermath of resistance destroyed the culture of learning within large sections of our communities, leading in the worst-affected areas to a virtual breakdown of schooling and conditions of anarchy in relations between students, teachers, principals, and the education authorities.

The challenge we faced at the dawn of a democratic society was to create an education and training system in and through which all our people would be able to develop their potential to the full. It was the challenge posed by the vision of the Freedom Charter: “to open the doors of learning and culture to all”.

Before the African National Congress (ANC)-led democratic government took power in 1994; the ANC Education Department drafted a policy document (a document that became known as the yellow book) that has guided us on the transformation of the education system. It warned:

The journey we are embarking on is long and hard. The educational problems of our country run deep and there are no easy or quick-fix solutions. But this framework maps a way toward the transformation and reconstruction of the education and training system and the opening of access to lifelong learning for all South Africans. We need to walk this path together in confidence and hope.

And that is what we have done over the past 11 years. We have transformed the education system together in confidence and hope.

For a society so deeply cast in a racially exclusive mould of thought and practice, it is not difficult to imagine the scale of the task that we faced. Sometimes we underestimate the magnitude of the task. Our reforms are the largest and most widespread attempts to pursue the triple aims of equity, access and redress at the same time in an education system. Some say that the pursuit of those three principles at the same time is impossible, that our thinking is Utopian, that we are bound to fail.

We are committed to equality, not only to eradicating the racial indignities of our past but also to constructing a society in which there is no discrimination on the grounds of gender, or religion, or disability.

We are committed to social, economic and political inclusion, not only to including those who are excluded from employment or housing but also those who are excluded from acquiring the means to win employment and to afford housing.

We set in motion an ambitious plan to integrate education and training as a way of enabling black workers who had been denied access to social or vocational mobility to gain new skills and formal recognition of the knowledge they possessed.

We established a single national ministry of education and training and one department of education out of the unequal quilt of 17 or so education departments that existed under apartheid.

We introduced ten years of compulsory general education, and introduced obligatory school fees. However, under my ministry we are committed to abolishing fees so that there are no financial barriers to basic education.

We are improving the quality of education by introducing a reception year, by reducing class sizes in the foundation phase, and by building new classrooms and schools to improve the learning experience for the majority.

We rewrote the curriculum – perhaps one of our most demanding current challenges and one that causes the most resistance from parents and teachers – to cleanse it of racism and to recast it in the spirit of the modern world and in the values of our non-racist and non-sexist constitution.

We rewrote our language policy. In the past African languages were undervalued and underdeveloped. Blacks had little choice over the language in which they would be instructed. It was crucial to redesign our language policy so that it reinforced an inclusive approach to cultural identity. We now have a policy of mother tongue instruction in the foundation phase and the encouragement of multilingualism throughout a child’s school career. Every child must learn to communicate in at least one indigenous language other than English and Afrikaans.

We redesigned the geo-political footprint of apartheid higher education with an ambitious programme of mergers and transformation.

We are busy with an equally ambitious programme to create a further education college system for the many students who need to acquire intermediate skills. We face a scarce skills crisis that is being addressed by a national skills development strategy, a learnership programme and a system of 23 sector education and training authorities, certainly one of the most ambitious and complex of all South Africa’s social development programmes.

Our transformation policy was shaped by the three principles of access, equity and redress. But in putting these three principles into practice we are constrained by four broad processes: extensive migration, the negotiated settlement, a lack of resources, and limited managerial capacity.

The end of apartheid released the limitations on mobility for the majority. There was significant migration of families and individuals away from rural areas into peri-urban areas in search of employment and better education opportunities. Household numbers in the cities have grown significantly, but job growth has not kept pace. Like elsewhere, the growth in employment has been in finances and services at the expense of mining, manufacturing and farms.

This has resulted in a situation where there are two economic growth sectors – one expanding, and the other marginal.

The negotiated settlement meant that there was no radical rupture with the past. We had to work through some important bottle-necks. The first was co-operative government. Well designed on paper, tensions between the national and provincial levels have often been blamed for the lack of the provision of services on the ground. For example, we at the national level tried and failed to impose uniform pupil-teacher ratios on provinces.

The second bottle-neck to democratic transformation was the degree of self-governance granted to schools. We gave powers to school governing bodies over the admission of pupils, the choice of language, the hiring of teachers and the charging of school fees that existed nowhere else in the world. The outcome has been a far slower transformation of the schooling system than we anticipated in 1994.

The third constraint was a lack of resources. When we came to power we chose to build a sound monetary and fiscal basis for expansion in the future. That basis has been built and we are now growing at over four cent a year. We know that we need to accelerate to improve the quality of life for all our people. We would love to have the problem that China faces of trying to work out how to slow growth down.

Last, we lacked the managerial capacity that we needed for rapid transformation. The absence of managerial capacity in many provinces created a huge gap between the potential of the policies designed at national level and the ability of the provinces to implement them.

In closing, let me say that working for democratic transformation through a negotiated revolution has slowed down the pace of racial integration in our schools but we are proud of what we have achieved and are working hard at improving the quality of education that we provide in South Africa.

I thank you.

Issued by: Department of Education
27 November 2005
   

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