8 April 2000
Chairperson
Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris
Rabbi Isadore Rubenstein
Mr Samuel Berman
Distinguished members of the Board
Honoured guests
I am delighted to have been able to accept your invitation, not just out of duty, but because of genuine interest and concern for the work that you do.
Formal Jewish education in this country stretches back to the founding of the Jewish School in Kerk Street, Johannesburg, in 1890—the harbinger of the Jewish day school movement. The South African Board of Jewish Education, which has given shape and direction to religious and secular education in the Jewish community, was established in 1928. Your Board must therefore be one of very few organisations serving education in South Africa whose continuous history stretches back over 70 years.
This is a notable achievement, and I congratulate you. To have survived and prospered over this tumultuous period in our national life indicates a rare ability to persevere faithfully and to adapt prudently.
If these qualities have stood you in good stead in past decades, they are needed in full measure now, in this momentous period of democratic transition through which our country and region are passing.
I have learnt with great interest of the variety and scope of the schools controlled by or affiliated with your Board. Your educational objective—"excellence in Judaic and secular studies"—is admirably concise. It is clear that only the best will do. The record of your schools indicates that you have not only aimed high but also achieved at the highest level. Your schools shine brightly in the hugely diverse firmament of South African education.
Your Board is also rightly concerned with innovation on many fronts, as exemplified by your interesting partnership with the Knowledge Network, which is aimed at the use of computers in school as a tool for improved productivity, research and communication. I hope there will be ways for the broader school system to benefit by your experience in this vital area of modern pedagogy.
A communal organisation is by definition inward-looking. But the South African Board of Jewish Education has a well-developed sense of civic responsibility. This has led your schools to undertake partnerships with public primary and secondary schools whose material and professional endowment is far less than their own. I congratulate you on the success of the Board’s Education Development Programme, and I hope it will go from strength to strength.
My colleague, Deputy Minister Smangaliso Mkhatshwa, is keen to organise the much-delayed conference on Partnerships for School Improvement. We need the conference in order to showcase the excellent work that is being done, by your Board’s schools and many others. We also need it in order to spread the good word that professional co-operation and interchange among schools helps build better schools and better South Africans.
I have been asked to address you this evening on the challenges to education in South Africa in general, and the Jewish education system in particular. That is a very capacious and generous assignment, and I shall not pretend to be more than selective in my treatment of it. For one thing, I will confine myself almost entirely to the school sector, which is where your Board is most active.
I begin with a statement that may seem commonplace. But, given our history, it is anything but. I believe you will share every syllable of it. We are here this evening as South Africans. We are here as South African educators. We are concerned about the future of our children in a democratic South Africa. It is our collective responsibility, and no one else’s, to build our democracy, so that our children and grandchildren will not have to endure the humiliations and degradation that our forefathers and we endured in the land of our birth. It is our responsibility to build a South Africa that will progressively shed the ages-long inheritance of want and penury, of illiteracy and disempowerment. We believe that effective education, true education, is the key to personal fulfilment and an absolute necessity for the moral, social and economic regeneration of our people.
Can I take it that we stand together on these propositions?
I will not condescend to you by recounting the condition of the divided, unequal and ideology-ridden system we inherited in 1994, nor trace the steps we have taken to create the policies and the legislation on which a strong, just and effective new system can be built.
Under President Mandela’s administration, a South African government possessed moral credibility and political legitimacy for the first time in our history. The Mandela government removed the obvious manifestations of apartheid, established new policies and laws fit for South African democracy, and took the first steps toward improving the lot of the dispossessed and downtrodden.
After our second democratic elections, President Thabo Mbeki made it clear that the people had given his new government an express mandate: to attack poverty and unemployment, and to accelerate and improve the delivery of essential services.
In order to focus our work in education, I asked all the main national actors in education—including the independent schools associations, of which your Board was one—the question President Mbeki had asked me: "Is our education system fit for the 21st century?" After an intense listening period, I concluded that in many crucial respects it was not. I said so, and I said why, in my Call to Action, a document that launched a national mobilisation for education, and laid out nine priorities for urgent action.
The Department of Education then worked the nine priorities into five programmes, and in January this year, Deputy President Jacob Zuma launched our Tirisano ("working together") programme of action for the period January 2000-December 2004.
This document sets out the challenges we face in enabling our education system to meet President Mbeki’s test of fitness for the 21st century, and how we are going about them. Although you have kindly asked me to talk about our challenges, it would be quite inappropriate, in a keynote address of this kind, to bore you with a précis of our five-year plan. Instead, I shall commend it to you in its entirety, and select a couple of points for special emphasis.
In democratic South Africa, the touchstone of public policy and state action is the 1996 Constitution. At the very least, public policy and state action must not offend the Constitution. It must be consistent with the Constitution. It must carry out any explicit and implicit duties that the Constitution lays upon the state. And one such unbreachable constitutional duty is to protect, and advance the fulfilment of, the fundamental rights that the Constitution establishes.
Section 29 of the Constitution is the bedrock of education policy. This is the section that establishes the fundamental right to education. Subsection (1) is very clear. "Everyone has the right to a basic education, including adult basic education, and to further education, which the state, through reasonable measures, must make progressively available and accessible".
My reading of section 29(1) is unambiguous. The fundamental right to a basic education belongs to all persons, child and adult, and it is a peremptory right—it is not qualified (as is the right to further education) by language about reasonable measures and progressive availability. A peremptory right imposes a peremptory duty on the state, in other words a duty that the state must carry out, willy nilly.
Now, at least a quarter of our adult population (and a far higher proportion of the African adult population) is without basic education, and such a deficit is not made up overnight. There are, of course, other grave deficits in the provision of basic education, such as the woeful lack of early childhood development provision, the grossly inhuman physical conditions at too many schools, especially in rural areas, and the pitiful condition of too many learners with special education needs. These deficits, too, cannot be erased overnight.
It is therefore reasonable to require the state to lay out a plan—with accompanying resource requirements—for overcoming the deficits in basic education provision, and to execute the plan in the quickest possible time. I accept that the government has such an obligation under the Constitution. I believe that the Tirisano implementation programme goes a long way toward spelling out how it must be tackled, but we need to go further and we shall do so.
I am not interested in empty rhetoric and vacant promises. I am too old in the tooth for gimmicks to have any appeal. I say, therefore, with conviction, that the protection and fulfilment of the fundamental right of all persons to basic education is the most important of my responsibilities as Minister of Education. In the language of your invitation, it is the greatest challenge we face. On this point, SANGOCO and I are as one. But I would be deluding you if I suggested that making good on the achievement of such a right, for all persons in this country, is a mere breeze, a walk in the park. It is no such thing. As governments world wide have found—including governments five-fold better resourced than ourselves—the provision of effective basic education for all, especially the most vulnerable, is a never-ending challenge.
Ten years ago, in March 1990, the World Conference on Education for All met in Jomtien, Thailand, under United Nations auspices. It was the largest world gathering on education ever assembled. It adopted the World Declaration on Education for All, whose first Article, "Meeting Basic Learning Needs", I want to read to you in full. I do so because it is one of the most pointed and fitting statements of commitment to education ever penned.
"EDUCATION FOR ALL: THE PURPOSE"Article 1. Meeting basic learning needs
"1. Every person—child, youth and adult—shall be able to benefit from educational opportunities designed to meet their basic learning needs. These needs comprise both essential learning tools (such as literacy, oral expression, numeracy and problem solving) and the basic learning content (such as knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes) required by human beings to be able to survive, to develop their full capacities, to live and work in dignity, to participate fully in development, to improve the quality of their lives, to make informed decisions, and to continue learning. The scope of basic learning needs and how they should be met varies with individual countries and cultures, and inevitably, changes with the passage of time.
Let me pause here to remark that the paragraph I have just read is part of our own national policy. The Ministry of Education quoted and endorsed this opening statement from the World Declaration on Education for All in the first education white paper, back in February 1995. Since the 1993 Constitution had established the right of every person to basic education, it was necessary to interpret what "basic education" meant, and the Jomtien Declaration was accepted as the most appropriate authority.
What is more, all our policies, notably including our outcomes-based approach to curriculum development, are entirely consistent with the Jomtien vision of education.
Article 1 of the Declaration continues:
"2. The satisfaction of these needs empowers individuals in any society and confers upon them a responsibility to respect and build upon their collective cultural, linguistic and spiritual heritage, to promote the education of others, to further the cause of social justice, to achieve environmental protection, to be tolerant towards social, political and religious systems which differ from their own, ensuring that commonly accepted humanistic values and human rights are upheld, and work for international peace and solidarity in an interdependent world."3. Another and no less fundamental aim of educational development is the transmission and enrichment of common cultural and moral values. It is in these values that the individual and society find their identity and worth.
"4. Basic education is more than an end in itself. It is the foundation for lifelong learning and human development on which countries may build, systematically, further levels and types of education and training."
Next month, the World Forum on Education for All meets in Dakar, Senegal, to review how well the world has progressed in making good on the Jomtien Declaration, from whose simple and evocative language I have just quoted. We were privileged to host one of the regional preparatory meetings on Education for All here in Johannesburg in December last. Our country report, which will soon be publicly available, provides an even-handed analysis of our progress toward the goals set out in the Declaration. In a word, we are proud of what we have achieved since April 1994, but we are still far from meeting the constitutionally guaranteed rights of all our people to basic education, especially the poorest and those who have been historically deprived of access. It is my solemn responsibility to bend every effort to achieve that goal.
It is clear beyond any doubt that a flourishing modern democracy, and a successful modern economy, derives its essential sustenance from a well-functioning, universal, basic education system, and from well-balanced, properly articulated, socially relevant, alert and responsive further and higher education sectors.
An effective national school system is the very rock and foundation on which all else rests. We do not yet have such a foundation. It is of paramount importance that we construct it. It is one of the most appalling indictments against the apartheid legacy—aggravating the inherent injustices and humiliations—that the disintegration of essential values and educational standards in the public school system took place simultaneously with the quantitative expansion of school opportunity during the last 25 years of racist minority rule. So, the rot spread as the system expanded in the townships and homelands.
But, Chairperson, ladies and gentlemen, I truly believe that we are at the end of the beginning of the reconstruction process in our schools. I sense that there is a much more complete and nuanced public understanding, among opinion-formers as well as among ordinary citizens, of the depth of the problems in our national school system and their ferocious complexity. That is the beginning of wisdom.
I discern two trends that are of incalculable value. Firstly, public opinion now recognises that we indeed have one national school system. It is a system that is horribly disfigured by inequality in access, facilities, resources, professional capacity and performance, but it is one system. It is our system. We have collective responsibility for it. No one else but us—only we South Africans—can make it better. This represents a remarkable shift from the group-thinking of the past, whose worst product was that South Africans grew up ignorant of and indifferent to the welfare of their fellow citizens, and often wilfully oblivious to the growing dereliction around them.
The second trend is equally unmistakable. Public opinion insists that all those who work and learn in schools, and in the system that serves the schools, are accountable to the public for what they do.
The culture of impunity in education has been one of the most debilitating legacies of the period of resistance to apartheid authority. Now the public and the educational leadership alike have wholly and utterly repudiated that scourge. True partnerships of professional concern are being forged between the education departments and the teacher organisations. This is not foolish romanticism. I know very well that vigorous contestation is still the characteristic form of engagement between unions and employers. But unions and employers share very important common ground on matters relating to the professional responsibility of teachers and the priorities for school effectiveness. The South African Council for Educators (SACE) will get new authority when the SACE Bill is enacted this year. I am counting on the Council to be a vigorous and lion-hearted champion of the highest values of the noblest of professions.
The vocation of teacher has a special resonance among those who profess the Jewish faith, just as it does in Islam, the faith of my own forebears. I want now to take up the second part of your invitation, and address a few questions that may be of particular interest to the South African Board of Jewish Education and the schools associated with the Board.
Your schools are independent schools, and as such they are the subjects of explicit constitutional protection. Section 29 of our Constitution establishes the right of everyone "to establish and maintain, at their own expense, independent educational institutions that do not discriminate on the basis of race, are registered with the state, and maintain standards that are not inferior to standards at comparable public educational institutions". State subsidies for independent educational institutions are not precluded.
The precise wording of this provision was one of the most contentious of all the issues with which the Constitutional Assembly grappled, and the outcome represents a finely crafted balance of interests. The right to establish an independent institution is a real right, but it is not unfettered, and it is exercised only within a clearly specified framework of public interest. Independent institutions must be non-racial, registered and of acceptable quality, otherwise they have no constitutional protection. The government has a clear duty to set up a registration process for all independent education institutions, linked to a process of quality assurance. That has been done in the South African Schools Act, 1996.
As for state subsidies—well, they are not forbidden by the Constitution. Remember, the Constitution expressly establishes the right of everyone to establish and maintain an educational institution at own expense. The constitutional presumption is that the owner provides. Whether or not the state offers a subsidy is a policy matter, to be decided in the public interest. Such policy, backed by the South African Schools Act, was laid down in October 1998 in the national school funding norms and standards, and it came into effect in January this year. The essential principle of national policy is that subsidies may be provided to eligible independent schools on a graduated scale that relates to the level of fees charged by the school. At the top end, no subsidy may be provided to a school that charges fees that are 2.5 times the average per learner cost of public school education in its province. The maximum level of subsidy is 60 per cent of the per learner cost of public education in a province.
Both before and after the policy was established, there was intensive consultation with independent school interests, as well there should be. I had the pleasure of meeting a strong delegation only last month, to discuss matters of serious concern to independent school proprietors. Top of the list was the zero subsidy bracket. We had an interesting discussion, but I informed the delegation that the zero subsidy bracket would stand.
My reasoning is as follows. National education spending runs at 21 per cent of all government spending, and an average of 41 per cent of provincial government spending. Yet, provincial expenditure per learner in a public school averages around R3 000, which is very far from adequate. In such circumstances, if an independent school proprietor operates a school on an economic base that requires learner fees of at least two and a half times this figure, I can find no moral necessity for public subsidy.
I recognise, of course, the force of the argument that many independent schools in the top fee bracket would like to diversify their clientele, and that many support bursary schemes in order to ensure that children of less affluent parents gain admission. Such schemes deserve strong support, both by better-off parents, and by sponsors and charitable trusts. In particular, there is much to be said for diversifying the racial and cultural composition of schools by this means. Schools should do this out of a keen sense of civic responsibility and awareness. But, in itself, the argument does not constitute a compelling claim for public funds.
There is another dimension to the work of independent schools, including many distinguished schools under the auspices of your Board, which deserves and will get serious attention from my Ministry. This is the outreach, or development work to which I have already made reference. Your Board’s Education Development Programme is a conspicuous case in point, with its work in teacher development, adult life skills education, early childhood development, curriculum development, and general support for primary and secondary schools in poor communities. I told the independent schools delegation last month that my Ministry would give very careful consideration to how such invaluable work might be supported. I do not know the answer yet, but I have charged the Department of Education with investigating the matter and I look forward to being advised. Obviously, the Department will depend on very close interchange with the Independent Schools Association of Southern Africa and its constituents.
I accept without equivocation, as I said at the outset, the close identity of this Board, and your schools, with the best interests of our country and the success of South African democracy. The contribution that your schools make to the social, economic, public and spiritual life of our country is inestimable, and no doubt quite disproportionate to their number. So it has been, and so it should continue to be.
In this light, you and I must share a common concern about the number of highly educated and skilled young South Africans who are emigrating. I know that many Jewish spiritual and communal leaders are extremely anxious about the potential danger of emigration to the future of a community that numbers less than 100 000 in a population of 40-odd million.
Quite clearly, enterprising young people from all communities have a yearning to explore the world. Some will have the chance to pursue their education abroad, and gain work experience there. Good luck to them. South Africa, like any other country, has always benefited from such experience. For some of us, myself included, life abroad was wonderfully enriching, but reluctant exiles as we were, we could not wait to return. In the era of democracy, of free travel in and out of our country, I hope that will be the spirit in which young graduates of your school system spread their wings abroad. I would like to think that the days of encouraged emigration from the South African Jewish community, especially the young and well-educated, are past.
Finally, Chairperson, may I express my appreciation for the fact that the schools controlled by and in association with your Board comprise a community of values as well as providing a focal point for community life. Both elements are indispensable, and in my view they depend upon one another for health and sustenance.
One of the nine priorities I enunciated for our national education system is that "The school must become the centre of community life". Of course, in a strict sense, there are many centres of community life. But the point is the school is the pre-eminent facility, perhaps the only public facility, in many communities throughout the length and breadth of our land. Moreover, every family is (or ought to be) touched by the school, because their children are entrusted to it for their formal intellectual and social preparation for life in the adult world. So the school ought to be a place where parents feel as at home as the children, a place capable of offering a range of services and opportunities for intellectual, sporting, social and cultural activity. And it ought to be a place where the pre-eminent human values are cherished, taught, upheld, debated and exemplified.
We know only too well how far short many schools fall. That is why I have posed the challenge to restore the school to the centre of community life, to make it a beacon of hope and a source of regeneration for our troubled society.
I will shortly be receiving from Professor Wilmot James a report on diversity and values in South African education, a matter very close to my heart. I hope the South African Board of Jewish Education will join in the ensuing debate. There—let me leave that with you as a final challenge this evening.
Chairperson, ladies and gentlemen, I thank you.