In his state of the nation address President Cyril Ramaphosa promised that young South Africans will be "moved to the centre of our economic agenda". He’d better hurry. With schools settling down to the new year, and the new wave of bright-eyed first-year students attending classes, tens of thousands of young people are enrolled in an education system that risks obsolescence. Earlier in 2017, Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga declared that the country needs curriculum change. She was right, but horribly wrong in her follow-through. In a speech during visits to schools in the North West, Motshekga said that there were "too many academic schools" in the country. She decried a "colonial landscape of education" in which "everybody wants to go to university". She offered a simple solution: more vocational schools. It "does not mean that if you go to vocational college your career is limited — you can be anything, using your hands." Decades of state mismanagement of education have ...
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