Durban - KwaZulu-Natal needs R65 billion to ensure all children going through the education system are exposed to decent infrastructure.
Speaking on the second day of the eThekwini social cohesion conference at the international convention centre in Durban on Friday, the head of department for education in the province, Nkosinathi Sishi, said that using current budget allocations, it would take 17 years to ensure “decent schooling in each district”.
He said that while the official pupil-teacher average sat at 30:1, provincial averages did not speak to schooling as a whole. “Some classrooms have a ratio of 80 pupils to one teacher,” he said.
KwaZulu-Natal’s 12 districts have over 6 000 schools, 2.8 million learners and 90 000 teachers.
Sishi said that an education system could not be run in isolation from the needs and values of a community, “then you are defeated”.
He said that educators remained the key to placing the province’s education on a trajectory of improvement.
He said that while Information Technology should be looked at as a tool to supplement teaching, it should not be regarded as a replacement for teachers.
“In South Africa, some in the system believe that technology will help us to arrive at the golden goal, but I believe the teacher is central to attaining quality education,” he said.
Some of the main priorities in KZN education were infrastructure challenges, a widening digital divide and student retention, he said.
“Another key challenge is producing young people who exit the schooling system and are able to improve South Africa economically; but we do not want them to simply be consumed by the economic system, their education must be holistic, they need to understand the importance of community improvement and work to improve the living conditions of the citizenry,” he said.
“The South African education system is out of tune when it comes to employability of those leaving the system. We must introduce new curriculum areas. Of our matriculants, 80% are in the academic stream. What happens to those who aren’t?” he said.
Sishi said it was important to introduce technical vocational aspects to the curriculum as well as technical occupational aspects. Human and community development must be improved through education, he said, and parents needed to ensure that their homes were 100% education friendly.
Sishi said that while “some” say educators were apartheid educated as they were taught to teach an apartheid curriculum with segregated classrooms, it was important to discuss the elephant in the room: “Have we succeeded in supporting teachers to turn education around?”
“Each child must be taught by a teacher who is well supported. We also need support for the underdogs in the classroom – those with special needs, those who walk kilometres to get to school,” he said.
He said that while physical access to education was ensured in the province, it was imperative to look at social economic access and access to knowledge.
What if children can’t access education because it is in a language that is not their first or second or even third language? How do they compete against other children?”
He said that education should not only be characterised by tests for global assessment, such as the Programme for the International Students Assessment test. “Here the emphasis is on skills and high cognitive abilities in literate workers. We must also centre our education on the dreams of humanity as a whole,” he said.
Sishi said that the humanist, democratic and environmentally sustainable aims of education were little articulated and under-developed.
He said that there was a decline in social cohesion in South African education and that school segregation contributed to this. “Segregation today is sophisticated, it is not just about being black and white. It is about being poor and rich and class. We must balance the race debate with debate about class and culture,” he said.
He said that when an education system was out of tune, it was a microcosm of society. “When we have school violence, we usually also have violence in the country and society,” he added.
ANA