Johannesburg, 11 March 2000.
Director of Ceremonies
Comrade Ignatius Jacobs,
MEC for Education,
Gauteng Province
Chairperson of the Gauteng Education and Training Council
Council Members
Ladies and Gentlemen
I am very pleased to be here today to share some of my thoughts with you. It is always invigorating to interface with people who are intimately involved in the project of my life, education.
Lately, whenever I am asked to give my perceptions on the current situation in South African education, I am tempted to refer my audience to the Tirisano programme. For two reasons, though, I avoid doing that. The first is that it could be considered an easy way out. The second, and more important, is that I do not want Tirisano to become some kind of a mantra, learned by rote, regurgitated out of context and denuded of its import. One could also add that one would like to avoid sounding like a scratched record, in the process boring audiences to daydreams. My preferred approach is therefore to allow the programme to find its own way into my reflections and speeches. That way it also becomes subject to continual interrogation.
It might be useful to refer to critical steps I have taken in the past few weeks and reflect on their intentions as well as implications. Arguably the most important, not only for education but literally the very physical and material future of the country, relates to HIV/AIDS. With clearer and more accessible policy guidelines which better equip our teachers to be more practically capacitated to handle HIV and AIDS-related challenges such as injuries and learner attitudes in our schools, we have finally made our schools the vanguard of education against this pandemic. We have furthermore fronted HIV/AIDS by making sexuality education an important part of our Lifeskills learning area. We do not underestimate the potential trauma of teachers grappling with terminal illnesses like AIDS, hence our revisiting of the guidelines.
Speaking of teachers and trauma, a central theme in my project to revamp education in the country has been the restoration of a positive morale on the part of teachers. The latest step in that agenda has been my announcement, not too long ago, that the redeployment process would be completed by June. This announcement, with other initiatives my Ministry has undertaken in recent weeks, has gone a long way towards rebuilding the morale of our teachers. The redeployment process was necessary to straighten the skewed teacher patterns of the mishmash that was apartheid, but as it dragged on it created an uncertainty which negatively affected long-term planning within the system.
The challenge of increasing teacher morale remains, but will hopefully receive further momentum through the National Teacher Awards we shall be making on 5 October and the Most Improved Schools Awards we shall be handing out in January 2001 after the announcement of the Matric results.
I should caution as early as now, though, that at our awards we shall not allow the voyeuristic fashions that characterise the Oscar Awards in Hollywood. Imagine our teachers in hot pants and see-through this and that and you will understand my early warning.
On a serious note, we are indeed serious about improving our schools. Our commitment in this regard was practically manifested by our announcement, on 14 February, of a crack unit to focus on dysfunctional high schools. This is not the discredited inspector system but a developmental initiative twinned with the principle of accountability to our communities. Our schools are public institutions; as such they have to be held accountable.
For members of that unit, we definitely do not have in mind apartheid-style people who would wax lyrical about schools where they were wined and dined to a satiation that afterwards needed packet after packet of ENO bubbling salts to control.
The demand for more accountability from the dysfunctional high schools follows a new hands-on and more direct intervention in schooling by both myself and the MECs for Education. In a departure from tradition, our beginning-of-the-year visits to schools have not been merely symbolic but practical steps to demand proper educational practices on the part of our teachers, learners and principals. It was indeed with fun but great satisfaction that I read of MEC Jacobs' storming of a night club in Tembisa, his ejection of drunken learners and his herding them back to school. I could not help but think of the Biblical scene where Christ is reported to have sjambokked traders out of a temple, except that in our particular case there is a slight inversion.
Please note that we are not going about this business in a random fashion, disregarding the professional and ethical issues related to school supervision. Our programme includes developing proper frameworks and instruments for managing supervision in schools. Some of these include regulations on records to be kept by schools, regulations on the role of principals and management teams during strikes, a framework document on whole school review, and an implementation plan for the agreement on teacher appraisal. I have also published the Norms and Standards for Educators, which spell out the kinds of competencies that need to be developed in our teacher education and development programmes.
I think there is definitely a new paradigm at work in our education, with accountability not shouted from Pretoria and Provincial capitals but effectively demanded via spot checks. For far too long some of our schools have laboured under the impression that their existence is an end in itself, and that there is no need for excellence.
Besides some of the modus operandi developments I have sketched so far, one must refer to the more intellectual ones such as my 8 February appointment of a Task Team to review OBE and the implementation of Curriculum 2005. Lessons from this review are bound to impact quite practically on ongoing work in education. This review might well result in a review of other processes and plans. Please do not read this to mean that I foresee a 180 degrees turn proposal. Far from it, the review is meant to identify weaknesses, suggest remedies, and point at strengths to be reinforced.
It is therefore logical to assume that Grades 4 and 8 will be introduced as planned in 2001. This will not be a new cohort of learners but the natural flow of learners currently in Grades 3 and 7. The preparation of provincial officials for the implementation of Grades 4 and 8 is currently underway. They are being prepared as "trainers of trainers" and will engage teachers directly - thus removing a layer in the cascade.
A potentially more radical and topical report might emanate from another Task Team I have recently set up. This is the CHE's Task Team to advise me on what is known as the size and shape issue in higher education. Put bluntly, this means I would like to know exactly how many higher education institutions are needed in this country, and what programmes they are supposed to offer if we are to make a meaningful contribution to the country's human resource development needs. Should all the institutions focus on the trilogy of teaching, research and community service? What differentiation is necessary? Should every province, like each apartheid homeland demanded, have its own university?
You do remember of course that all the apartheid homelands had to have airports as well, don't you?
Another higher education challenge relates to the registration of private higher education institutions. We are tightening the regulatory framework in this regard, the idea being to protect the South African public higher education system from being undermined by institutions whose selling point might solely be that they are "private". The South African people must be protected from potentially inferior education. You may have noticed that before we accelerated the process of regulation private higher education institutions were threatening to be as many as corner cafes, exactly the kind of situation we had when the apartheid regime established teacher-training colleges at every corner.
Apart from the challenges of physically reconfiguring the higher education landscape and regulating private higher education provision, arguably the most demanding challenge we face in the future is that of educational infrastructural development. Those of us based in Gauteng will never fully understand the extent to which physical degradation still exists in our schools. You might have some sense of this if I recount how, during the flighting of my Department's video on the wrack and the ruin of some of our schools, I in fact shed some tears. And I am not the crying type, ask the leader of the official opposition in Parliament.
We may well have among our leaders people who were schooled under trees and classrooms without doors and window panes, but that was a direct and deliberate result of a system which denied the humanity of black people. But these are days of human rights and the dignity of the heart, the mind and the soul of humanity; these are times of the sacredness of the spirit and the being of our people; these are moments of the reconstruction of the essence of our lives. None among us should be left to suffer without us, both as government and fellow citizens, doing whatever we can to alleviate their plight.
In the old-time spirit of consultation and democracy, towards the end of this year I am convening an Education Parliament so that together, one society, one nation, we may take stock of where we shall be and chart a further path forward. Some of the challenges I have alluded to shall then, in the language of the left, hopefully be deconstructed, interrogated and unpacked.
As I close I should refer to something about which some of you might be wondering. Many of you must have read some newspaper profile that was written about me. In it the writer referred to my speeches as quite often literary, with poetry often used to illustrate some of my points. You may therefore be asking yourselves why it is that I have not referred to poetry or even other genres in my speech today.
The answer is in William Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar. There a mob angry at the murder of Julius Caesar goes out searching for his murderers. They have the murderers' names but do not know some of them, so they ask everyone they come across what their names are. One of the people they meet happens to be Cinna. Unfortunately one of the murderers is also Cinna, so there is a shout that the Cinna they have met is one of Caesar's murderers and must therefore be killed.
This is a different Cinna, and so he shouts that he is not the Cinna they want. He tells them that he is Cinna the poet, but they do not care. Instead they say he must be killed for his bad verses.
That is why I have decided not to use poetry today.
Director of Ceremonies, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you all.