The Gauteng MEC for education wants to merge overdeveloped suburban schools with underdeveloped township schools. This might sound progressive until one realises that it is just a cost cutting measure and an attempt to run away from the governments responsibility to provide decent quality education and education facilities and infrastructure to all communities and learners. The problems in our post-Apartheid education system started with Minister Bengu and Minister Manuel. Trevor Manuel imposed a voluntary structural adjustment program on South Africa during the 1990s. Teacher training colleges were shut down and many schools were actually closed down as well. They advice from the World Bank and the IMF was that teacher pupil ratios should be increased to 1:35 or more instead of the ideal 1:23. Thus the number of learners entering the system was massively increased while the infrastructure and human resources available to education shrunk. The tender system for the construction of new schools also meant that economies of scale through using the same blueprint for every school was ignored given that the rural school building program became a cash cow for tenderpreneurs. This new insanity by the Gauteng MEC for education is simply yet another means of contracting available resources instead of expanding them. What the country needs to do is to massively reduce defence spending, scrap all the provinces and the wasteful expenditure associated with them and invest massively in education. However, if there is not a parallel economic revolution we will just end up creating a population of unemployed educated people.The current education mess serves the interests of the mine bosses because uneducated cheap labour is the preferred human resource for neo-liberal capitalism An educated population will reject the cheap labour regime overseen by the ANC in government
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 12:06:49 +0000
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