The lesson is: fund pupils, not schools
India, which shares many of SA’s education woes, has had success with vouchers and low-cost private schools
In the film, Jack the Giant Slayer, an uncle who feels let down by a nephew he has raised into a young man complains: "For all these years I put food in your belly, clothes on your back and a roof over your head, what do I have to show for it? Beans!" This sums up the education crisis in SA. After half a century of fighting against Bantu education and ploughing billions of rand into education since 1994, what do we have to show for it? A handful of beans! Regrettably, they are not magic beans. In 1965, the proportion of black pupils with bachelor passes was 24.1%, in 1970 it was 35.6% and in 1975, it was 41.7%. The proportion of black pupils with bachelor passes in 2015? It decreased to 21.5%. It seems that black pupils had better outcomes with all odds stacked against them by apartheid than they have now in a democracy. Politics and the inflexibility of dogma are destroying SA’s education. The South African Democratic Teachers Union (Sadtu) is a plague that has infected every part ...
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