National Assembly, Cape Town, Tuesday, 14 March 2000
Madam Speaker, it is an honour to initiate the debate on the first Budget Vote of this Parliament. I invite you and Honourable Members to recognise the presence in the gallery of the provincial MECs for Education, accompanied by their heads of department. They are here at my invitation to witness this important debate, and to convene afterwards for a special meeting of the Council of Education Ministers with the Fiscal and Finance Commission. I thank them for their presence.
Madame Speaker, a budget debate ought to be the most elevated exchange of opinions on the important issues of the day. The Education Vote offers a great opportunity for us to contemplate what education in our new democracy is for, and what it is not for.
This is a good time to ask the question, "Why vote public funds for education services?"
Some might say, "Well, why not? Isn't that what parliaments are supposed to do?" Others might say, "Good question. The education system is so riddled with problems and inefficiencies that we should not throw good money after bad." Yet others might say, "Governments can't manage education services. Leave it to the private sector . They will sort it out."
There is something to be said for the first two responses, and very little to be said for the third. But all three responses challenge us to think more carefully about a matter that may seem so obvious that it is taken for granted.
I will not recapitulate the story of our efforts to reshape and reform our education system over the past six years. That has been done in my Department's 1999 Annual Report, which has been distributed to all Honourable Members. The Report provides a record of our stewardship of the funds voted by Parliament in 1998/99 as well as a retrospective account of the transformation of education during the first democratic administration whose term of office ended in mid-year. It gives a full account of the setting of new priorities for the next five years, under the banner of Tirisano, and our implementation plan.
We ought, therefore, to look at the fundamentals of educational policy.
I should like to begin the debate today by quoting one of this country's great teachers:
A flock without lambs is doomed. A herd without calves has no future. A people whose children are doomed to ignorance has no future. It is our children who are condemned to a world of darkness and ignorance, who will never fit in anywhere in the world after being shut away from the rest of humanity.. If we all realise that, we cannot, no matter what the odds, stand idly by and let that happen. Where are the mothers in this hall who will say: 'Never! Not to my child!' Where are the women of this nation who will say: Never! Not to my children? Have we less courage than the mother hen, that will dare the falcon that swoops down on her young? I do not think so.
The teacher's name was Phyllis Ntantala Jordan, and her son sits with us, in this House. This memorable speech was given in December 1953, and it was a call to arms against Bantu Education. Much has changed since then, but the essence of what she said then still resonates across time and space with special meaning.
Madame Speaker, Members of this house, Parents, Teachers and Learners of this Nation, while the budget is a key policy instrument, it is human beings who make it meaningful and its outcomes are about people. For this reason I want to talk to you today about our mothers and fathers and our inherited responsibility and commitment to public education and the development of our country. When we say people are at the centre of development, we do not refer to a nebulous group but to the parents, the learners, and the teachers who are directly affected.
Phyllis Ntantala's book, "A Life's Mosaic", is a case study of human endeavour and partnerships. It recounts her observations as a little girl growing up in the Transkei. It tells of how the community regarded the school within their midst as their responsibility - although among the poorest of the poor they helped the missionary build it, they taxed themselves to buy building materials, they ploughed the teachers fields for him - it usually was a 'him' - and they made sure his pantry was never empty.
The father of another in our midst tells the story about how he literally had to climb a five-mile-high mountain every day of his life - even if he was hungry, even if it was raining and miserable - to get from his home on the banks of the Tsomo River to the nearest school. That man was Govan Mbeki and his son is our President. He did it without fail and he earned himself two university degrees by the time he was thirty.
And the father of yet another who sits in the House became the very first African in this country of ours to register at a university in South Africa, and the very first African to gain a university degree in South Africa. His name was Professor ZK Matthews. He became a hero and a role model to generations of South Africans, because he showed that with diligence and perseverance, even with all the odds stacked against him, he could do it. He could make it.
In the 1950s, on the eve of the imposition of Bantu Education, Professor Matthews looked at his eighteen grandchildren - one of whom is now the chair of the National Council of Provinces - and he said:
Surely in their lifetime, they will see these remaining barriers surmounted. I think of this as I hear again in my memory the words I heard so often from my parents: Education was the weapon with which the white man had conquered our people and taken our lands. It was often thought, my father would say, that the white man had conquered because he had superior weapons, guns. . No, he would insist, the real reason for our defeat was the white man's education and the black man's lack of it. Only by mastering the secrets of his knowledge would we ever be able to regain our strength and face the conqueror on his own terms.
Now times have changed since Professor Matthews wrote that. We no longer see ourselves as "conquerors" and "the conquered". We no longer see education as the white man's preserve, as something we have to learn if we are to beat him.
I am sure that every member of this House can recollect a time when public provision of education for the majority of our citizens was bitterly contested. "We shall open the doors of learning to all" was one of the most heartfelt pledges of the Freedom Charter. No government of democratic South Africa can be exonerated from the burden of making good on that promise. Professor Matthews, and Phyllis Ntantala, and Govan Mbeki have taught us that knowledge has no colour, knowledge has no race, or language.
The idea that governments have responsibility for public education came rather late in the development of modern nation states. The global pattern of the modern nation state had its origin in Europe and then America. In those countries, across most of the centuries in the millennium just ended, formal education as we know it today was a privilege of aristocrats and well-to-do merchants. The religious authorities were employed to undertake the teaching of the rich and powerful. Charity schools were set up for the schooling of the poor. So education mirrored the social divisions of the feudal and early capitalist eras.
The notion that the state has a responsibility to provide for the education of its citizens has several different strands, and not all of them are attractive and wholesome. Allow me, Madam Speaker, to briefly deal with three of them.
Firstly in the late nineteenth century, the modernising imperialist state, of which Prussia and then Germany were the models, saw public education as a tool for state building. They wanted common schools to generate sentiments of patriotism and national identity across the German-speaking peoples of Europe. They wanted an army of soldiers who could understand their orders and use the new technology of war, and skilled workers for the growing factories.
Secondly, at the same time, in the robust young United States of America, newly united and rapidly industrialising after the Civil War, the idea was propagated that public education was the seedbed of democratic liberties. Every citizen had a right to go to school. Thus a nation of immigrants would become loyal Americans under one flag, and a nation of many states spread across a continent would imbibe a common set of symbols and values. Of course, every one of these sentiments in the United States was traduced and betrayed by the slavery tradition and the successful march of segregation from the South into the American heartland, under which a black was only three fifths of a man, until the Civil Rights movement exploded on to the scene in the 1950s and 60s.
A third model of public education was born after the Russian Revolution. In Marxist-Leninist thought, public education would be the vehicle to advance the message of social equality. Soviet education would create a new socialist consciousness in the minds of all citizens, starting in infancy. Class subservience and religious obscurantism would be challenged and overcome on the ideological battlefield.
All three traditions were founded on the belief that public education should be universally available, compulsory for all citizens, organised and funded by the state. All three traditions infused public education with the patriotic mission to advance the manifest destiny of their peoples, in their own countries and the world. All three traditions had export models, devised by enthusiastic emulators in other countries or spread by conquest.
Let us acknowledge, then, that the birth of public education systems as we know them coincides with the birth of nation states in the modern era. Public education was seen as an indispensable adjunct of state building and nation building. It was enrolled in the service of the dominant state ideology, whether authoritarian or libertarian, or a complex fusion of both.
In other words, we are reminded that public education is a vessel into which social values may be poured, a vehicle to be steered in the public interest, however this is conceived.
So let us not romanticise public education as a self-evident good. Nothing in public affairs is self-evident. The social purpose it serves, and the integrity with which it is executed must validate every action of state. This is especially the case with public education systems, because they reach everyone and they traffic in knowledge, values and ideas.
Without doubt, the world we live in has been fashioned by the world-wide influence of public education systems. It has created the indispensable foundation of modern states, democratised knowledge, opened up advanced learning to countless millions, and provided the intellectual sinews for the development of modern technology and communications within a fast globalising world.
We know only too well about the havoc that the apartheid rulers unleashed on the education system and everyone in it, and the destructive effect of much of the active and passive resistance to apartheid authority in education. I want to draw attention to the fact that, before 1994, the fundamental aims of public education in South Africa had never been formulated with the welfare of all South Africans in mind. Such aims can only emanate from a government and a Parliament that command the consent of all the people of South Africa. Out of a racially fragmented society, we have had to create a non-racial and democratic system. So the challenge is to build a system for a democratic society.
Madam Speaker, all our people shared in the historic compromise of 1994. This has given us-in government, Parliament, civil society and education institutions throughout the country-an exceptional opportunity to think through the purpose of public education in a democratic South Africa.
To meet this challenge, the challenge of living in the 21st Century, let us give our children real hope by ensuring the success of active learning through properly organised outcomes-based education and move away from a highly authoritarian, rigid, curriculum-driven system. You are aware that I have convened a strong team of experts to review our implementation of outcomes-based education, namely curriculum 2005. But I remain convinced, as do all the teachers I have spoken to, in the potential of outcomes-based education, if it implemented successfully. Why is this? Perhaps I can answer by quoting once more from Professor Matthews in that speech he made as Cape President of the ANC in 1955, "Independent thinking has always been regarded by rulers as a dangerous thing to encourage among the common people."
Now, in the present, it is time for all of us who have a genuine interest in the education of our nation, to stand up and be counted. The future of our flock, of our herd, is in our hands: we are all parents, we are all teachers, we have all been learners. The reality is bleak: we have a democracy, we have a Constitution, we have formal equality, but many of our children remain doomed to ignorance.
What is the remedy?
The government blames the teachers, the teachers blame the parents, the parents blame the students, the students blame the government and in the end, instead of working it out, everyone gives up and goes off to a shebeen -as my colleague, the honourable MEC for Education from Gauteng, recently discovered to his horror in Thembisa - and drink themselves into oblivion.
Those children were not drinking and dancing during school hours because they are evil, or bad, or stupid. They were doing it because, even if they do not admit it, they have given up hope. If we, the stakeholders in the education system, have one goal that bonds us and unites us in everything we do, it is to give our children hope again.
We must equip our children with the skills to think critically and independently, for this will help them be productive members of society as much as will the fundamentals of reading, writing and arithmetic.
In this democratic South Africa of ours, unlike in the South Africa in which Professor Matthews had to live, the rulers are the people. We are their representatives, and we have nothing to fear from independent thinking. We know it makes our people, and thus our country, stronger.
We cannot solve all the enormous challenges we face overnight, nor over the past five years, nor over the next five years, but all of us, institutions, administrators, policy makers, owe it to our country that we hold out hope to this generation and those to come. Therefore I want to enunciate a statement of the scope and purposes of public education in our country that I trust will command wide support.
South Africans are in the process of creating a new nation, a truly inclusive South African nation. In this nation of diverse peoples and traditions, South Africans are learning to trust each other, to revel in the brilliance of our diversity, to honour every strand of cultural and linguistic identity and recognise its contribution to the strength and vitality of the whole.
We are on guard against the persistence of throwback behaviour from the dark past, in particular, racial arrogance and hard-necked linguistic and cultural exclusivity. Public education has a vital role in the building of this South African nation.
In the first place, public education must serve the needs of the overwhelming majority of South Africans.
The prerequisite of success here is that the public education system must be accessible to all. If facilities are not available close to where people live, or (despite what the law says) if high fees deter people from entering public facilities, then we have problems that need remedy. However I do not believe that the answer lies with a Thatherite type voucher system as advocated by some since our commitment must be to our education system as a whole and there must be no cherry picking, of developing the so-called better schools and the devil takes the hindmost.
Secondly, public education must embrace South Africans of all races, classes, religions and languages. Non-discriminatory admission is one thing. Actively creating a new, inclusive model school, college, technikon or university is another.
The prerequisite of success here is for public education institutions to examine their inherited institutional cultures, consider their new responsibilities, and be prepared to ditch old baggage and respond creatively to their changed circumstances.
Thirdly, the public education system must command public confidence. If public education is not delivering the level of service the people require, they will go elsewhere. Private providers of all varieties are ready to exploit any perceived gap left by inadequate public provision. Nevertheless registered private providers have a constitutional right to exist. But the duty of nation building rests on public institutions and the public system of provision. If they fail in their education function, they fail utterly also as nation builders. What is more, as soon as the public system fails to represent the South African people at large, its capacity for beneficial influence on the civic values of our new nation will be severely diminished.
I have referred to civic values and nation building. The public education system is not just a vehicle for the transmission of knowledge, still less for the passing of examinations, however important these may be. It is the social institution through which the principal values of our new nation, the key to our identity as South Africans, are conveyed to successive generations of learners and students.
This matter is so important that I recently invited Professor Wilmot James, the Dean of Humanities at the University of Cape Town, to lead an expert team in an investigation of values in South African education. I expect to receive their report at the end of this month. I will make it public at once, and invite an active debate on its findings.
So, the remedy must be worked out. It is easy to find scapegoats - we must resist this temptation.
Let us give our children hope again by restoring the status of teachers in our society to what it was before, and let us challenge our teachers to earn such status, so that our children can look upon them the way we looked upon Professor Matthews and Phyllis Ntantala. We have, for example, in Cape Town a young student, Delisile Mdleleni, from the Orange Farm informal settlement in Gauteng now studying for a degree in Information Technology at the University of the Western Cape who, against considerable odds, and through skipping through classes at school, obtained a matriculation exemption last year at age 15 years. Her example gives our children hope and her achievement must also acknowledge the devoted activity.
Our focus on teacher development will be guided by the recently published norms and standards for educators as well as by the evolving role of principals and managers in our schools. We are committed to improved and increased teacher development, school and financial management, and quality enhancement some of which will be funded out of the Policy Reserve Fund, of R272 million, set aside by the Minister of Finance for this year.
Let us give our children hope by creating a further education and training system that will equip them to meet the social and economic needs of the 21st century. This year we will introduce legislation to further integrate the Further Education and Training system into our overall framework. In this respect we should not forget the contribution of the Business Trust in helping to do this with R120 million assistance programme within an almost hidden area of education, the technical colleges.
Because let's be honest, nothing will give our children more hope than an education system which provides the prospect of jobs and a productive life, if they get through school successfully that is, and they will spend more time in the classroom and less in the shebeen.
Let us give our children hope by making our provincial delivery systems work. There are enormous competing interests for national funds but education has been identified as a priority and for that reason 21% of the national budget, R3 billion more than last year, will be spent on education, nearly 80% of it in the provinces. We must support the provinces in whatever ways we can.
However, Madam Speaker, Vote 8 contains no funds to support provincial education systems, other than conditional grants to assist provincial education departments to carry forward innovative work in capacity building and quality improvement. The bulk of education spending, of course, is not overseen by Parliament but by the nine provincial legislatures, which will make appropriations out of the funds voted to them in the block grant to provinces.
There is a disjunction, often noted in this House, between the political responsibility of the Minister of Education for the state of education throughout the country, and the fact that the Minister does not control, or even influence, provincial allocations for education. I am closing this gap, not with a constitutional amendment, but with a vigorous interpretation of the constitutional doctrine of co-operative government.
The Council of Education Ministers, which will meet later today in extraordinary session, is a vital organ for the execution of the national agenda in education. The nine MECs for Education and I are forging an excellent working relationship based on our common national programme of action, Tirisano, backed up by provincial plans. At our meeting today, we will give careful consideration to proposals by the Financial and Fiscal Commission that address some of the worrying features of the present allocation of provincial education funds. The FFC proposal present a hopeful development, which I trust will bring relief and hope to our largely rural provinces.
We have made headway in reducing the inherited financial disparities among provinces in the provision of education. The new FFC proposals should help take us toward that goal. What concerns me just as much is the persistence of inequality in education provision within provinces. I give notice that I intend to investigate this matter with my provincial colleagues as a priority in the year 2000.
Let us give our children hope by breaking the back of illiteracy among adults and youth. In order to advance this, I am pleased to announce that I have appointed John Samuel, a former Deputy Director General of the Department to assist with the setting up of a National Literacy Agency over the next six months. The literacy programme will involve the mobilisation of the entire community and I must note the undertaking of churches who desire to be actively committed.
Let us give our children hope by making schools the centres of community life once more, as they were when Phyllis Ntantala was a child. A simple example of this is that for the first time we are working closely with the Minister and Department of Sport and Recreation to co-ordinate our efforts at school level around sport and physical education (nowadays known as human movement studies!). School sport is regrettably, largely absent from many of our schools; we intend to bring it back. The experience of other countries has shown that school sporting activities leads to high performance competitive sport - we are proud therefore to be part of the South African application to host the 2006 World Cup in soccer.
Let us give our children hope by ending conditions of physical degradation in South African schools, so that we can learn and teach with dignity. We are expecting that more than R500 million will be spent by the provinces in the coming year on school refurbishment although as the President has indicated our funds are not inexhaustible so we need to plan and spend wisely. At this point I should add my thanks to the Minister of Finance for extending tax concessions to those donors who give donate money for public pre-primary, primary and secondary schools.
So too with our higher education system. Let us give our children hope by implementing a higher education system that grasps the intellectual and professional challenges facing South Africans in the 21st century too. The higher education sector is in the process of undergoing a process of root and branch transformation. The institutional framework is in place for implementing major changes.
The new programme-based funding system, envisaged by the Higher Education Act, 1997 will be phased in over the next few years, after careful preparation, including the implementation of the new Higher Education Management Information System. The total allocation to higher education over the past three years has increased by over R1,6 billion to R7 billion which 93% of the total allocation for Vote 8, an amount which compares favourably with even OECD norms. This includes an increase of over R50 million for the National Student Financial Aid Scheme. Since 1994 almost R1,7 billion has been allocated from the fiscus to student financial aid.
By June, the Council on Higher Education will present me with a report on the future size and shape of the higher education system. This is a long awaited event. I am confident that it will help us close the long and miserable chapter of apartheid education planning that began forty years ago. The CHE report will set the scene for major structural changes in higher education, and I expect to take to Cabinet my proposal on those changes very soon after receiving the report.
Let us give hope to our children with special needs, of whom there are at least 250 000. We have an emerging white paper to cater for education for learners with special needs. That is not to suggest that we need to develop two separate school systems - we need an integrated and single system but with special sensitivity and provision for those students who require it.
Let us also give hope to our pre-school children, and their parents, through our Early Childhood Development initiatives. We have to grapple with our commitment to 10 years of compulsory education which includes the Reception or Grade 0 level. We will be looking to innovative and creative ways and solutions to address our needs in this area.
Let us give our children hope, finally, by dealing urgently and purposefully with the HIV/AIDS emergency in and through the education and training system.
In conclusion I would like to thank all those who, through their hard work and effort, have contributed to our renewed commitment to making a success of education. The last year has been one which presented great demands and together with a new management style and the appointment of a new Director-General, Mr Thami Mseleku, we have pushed our staff to work even harder.
Of course we will expect our public service to rise to even greater heights in search of more efficient and sensitive government, although I should add that there are those who more than fulfil their commitment. At a school in Atlantis two weeks back I was pleased to see teachers in their classrooms at 5.00 pm preparing for a parents' meeting at 7.00 pm that night. We need to celebrate our teachers as well.
I would like to thank the Deputy Minister, Father Smangaliso Mkhatshwa and all the staff of the Department and particularly Dr Trevor Coombe who will be retiring later this year especially for his contribution to the education policy debate in the pre-1994 period and for taking that debate into government in 1994. He has also been a source of many ideas and much valued policy analysis over the last six years.
The response of the business community, particularly through the Business Trust and other significant individual support programmes has been of great assistance to the Department. International development assistance from donor governments and agencies has been and will continue to be an enormous resource and of considerable value. There have also been many members of the public who have helped in a voluntary capacity and who have given advice or assistance in one manner or another. Their contribution is much appreciated.
Madame Speaker, Members of this House, Parents, Learners and Teachers of this nation, I submit to you that with our Tirisano Programme, we have the foundations in place to turn this situation around, to bring hope to our children. Our overriding goal is to build a national public education system that will fit South Africa for the 21st Century, a system of which South Africans can be proud. Only South Africans can do it. Working together, we South Africans will do it.
Thank you, Siyabonga