Minister implies Pioneers on track!?

By A Daddy

In this follow-up article I shall address some of the other areas which I found of interest during the Minister of Education, Naledi Pandor's presentation at the GIBS Forum Event of 17 August 2005.
The presentation was mainly to people in the large business sector. The topic was - "Transforming Education in South Africa".
The minister mentioned some action and focus areas which she said the Department is working on.

These focus areas are the following:

1. To provide a basic educational foundation for kids. This includes reading, writing, and maths. To address the resource problems. Although there is a severe lack of teachers, there are also some schools that do not even have basic facilities such as toilets. Resources include these as well as many other needs.
2. To expand grade R so that the department would have 10 years of compulsory school attendance.
3. To successfully implement the new curriculum with a specific focus on maths and science. She acknowledged that there were initially a few implementation problems, but according to her most of these are now sorted out.
4. To recapitalize and develop FET institutions.
5. The improve on the scarcity of research and development projects in South Africa.
   

The floor was then opened for comments, questions and remarks.
Remarks and responses thereto included the following:

1. There are 920 teacher education quality assurance programs. (This probably does not make standardization an easy task.)
2. Regarding ABET the Minister believes the country needs a mass illiteracy campaign.
3. Something was mentioned about e-learning. There's apparently an e-learning policy - (E-learning sounds like something that can be done at home. This should be positive for home-schooling!?)
4. Someone said that graduates should be jobless as they have to create jobs. That's when Sam, the toilet man, told his story.
5. At that stage someone alleged that matric results are being tampered with. Maybe even adjusted upwards "slightly" as skills do not support grades.
   Although the Minister denied all of these she did mention that South Africa should perhaps, like other countries, have an entrance exam for Universities. Why should South Africa be so "special" that we do not have one?
   I then thought she said that one should focus on things such as reading, writing, maths and SA History for such a year and not specialize immediately e.g. BCom, BA, etc. as is currently the case. She later denied that she said it when a lady from a placement agency confronted her with this.
6. There was also some mention of assistance for people with disabilities and that little was being done in this regard.
   

I perceived most of the comments from the public to have a little bit of a negative bend which indicated to me that SA business was generally not ecstatic about the state of the educational system.

However, what's very pleasing is the fact that the Minister really seems interested in education.

She's generally looking out for the best interest of the kids of South Africa?

Based on this I will assume that the Minister should not have a problem with home-education.

In conclusion, Professor Gill Marcus of Gordon Institute of Business Science (who previously held positions of inter alia deputy Governor of the South African Reserve Bank and Deputy Minister of Finance), was part of the audience and wished to make a few closing remarks.
During this she made a challenge which went something like this:
"People in South Africa have now identified problems in the educational system. Let's stop looking at the Department of Education to solve these problems and ask ourselves: What am I going to do about the situation?"

Together with me, all the other home-schoolers in the audience probably said to themselves:
"Wow, I have already risen to the challenge - I have taken responsibility - I educate my kids at home!"

So, what I really want to get to is this following:
Our generation is the first generation of legal home-schoolers in South Africa. We are therefore pioneers. Pioneers explore un-chartered territory.
Now, although we have to make sure that we do not fall into some of the pit-falls of home-education there is one thing that we do not have to worry about and that is:

We do not have to be concerned that we are not giving our kids a good education.

Even if education was just about academics, which it's not, we would still pass with flying colors.