saved link:

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/Projects/StudyHall_Discuss/upload/090920-073858.safrica/

original link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/world/africa/20safrica.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

India's twin separated at birth.

Quotes:

Seniors here at Kwamfundo high school sang freedom songs and protested outside the staff room last year because their accounting teacher chronically failed to show up for class.

The principal of the school, Mongezeleli Bonani, said in an interview that there was little he could do beyond giving the teacher a warning.

Thousands of schools across South Africa are bursting with students, but the education system is often failing the very children depending on it most to escape poverty.

Post-apartheid South Africa is at grave risk of producing what one veteran commentator has called another lost generation, entrenching the racial and class divide rather than bridging it. Half the students never make it to 12th grade. Many who finish at rural and township schools are so ill educated that they qualify for little but menial labor or the ranks of the jobless.

“If you are in a township school, you don’t have much chance,” said Graeme Bloch, an education researcher at the Development Bank of Southern Africa. “white kids do reasonably and black kids don’t really stand a chance unless they can get into a formerly white school.”

Most teachers in South Africa’s schools today got inferior educations under the Bantu system, and this has seriously impaired their ability to teach the next generation, analysts say. Teachers are not tested on subject knowledge, but one study of third-grade teachers’ literacy, for example, found that the majority of them scored less than 50 percent on a test for sixth graders.

But South Africa’s schools also have problems for which history cannot be blamed, including teacher absenteeism, researchers say. And then when teachers are in school, they spend too little time on instruction.

“We must ask ourselves to what extent teachers in many historically disadvantaged schools unwittingly perpetuate the wishes of Hendrik Verwoerd,” he recently told a gathering of principals, implicitly challenging the powerful South African Democratic Teachers’ Union, which is part of the governing alliance.

The teachers’ union too often protected its members at the expense of pupils, critics say.

“We have the highest level of teacher unionization in the world, but their focus is on rights, not responsibilities,” 

South Africa’s new education minister, Angie Motshekga, said in an interview that a lack of accountability had weakened the whole system.

Teacher vacancies commonly go unfilled for months, she said. Principals cannot select the teachers in their schools or discipline them for absenteeism.

Here in the Western Cape, where the opposition Democratic Alliance recently came to power, the province is considering monitoring teachers’ attendance by having them send text messages or e-mail messages — in response to an electronic query — to confirm they are present.

Despite last year’s violent episode, students seem to feel genuine affection for their school and speak of their hunger for knowledge and their faith in education to bring a better life.

Even when they realized the science teacher was absent, the student body president and his sidekick, a radiantly optimistic AIDS orphan, rose to lead a review session on evolution. And when the second-period English teacher was late, they just kept on talking about Darwin’s finches and genetic mutations.



Randy

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