By Ashraf Ryklief
Few people will disagree that June 16, 1976 was the single most powerful catalyst in for the demise of apartheid in South Africa, something that in turn saw its culmination in the first democratic elections in 1994.
As we approach the 32nd anniversary of that first event, and have just passed the 15th anniversary of the second, we are forced to reflect on the gains and losses, particularly on the educational front, arising from the sacrifices of the Soweto generation.
That there have been gains cannot be denied. For example, from the insanity of being a single nation with 14 educational departments, we are now one with one.
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Another example: more than 90 percent of children (ages 7 to 17) are attending school - although there is no way of knowing how regularly. Then, at a budgetary level, the government continues to prioritise education, with spending on it planned for 2008/9 amounting to R140.4 billion.
It has been growing at 14 percent a year for the past three years. According to a 2008 South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) statement: "More South Africans than before are being educated. The proportion of persons aged 20 years and older with no schooling diminished from 17.8 percent in 1998 to 13 percent in 2006."
The same statement, however, also observes that the gains are overshadowed by a "widespread failure to improve the quality of such education".
As a nation, it would be easy for us to assume complacency and say, "alles sal regkom" - after all, the statistics are moving in the right direction. Yet how can we be complacent when the majority of black schools are still without basic necessities, such as electricity and water, let alone computer and science labs?
Or when so many children go to school on empty bellies, or when about 100 000 pupils are HIV/Aids sufferers, and when a large number of pupils are heads of their households because their parents have died of Aids?
On average, a million children drop out of school each year, with 40 percent of them never reaching even Grade 7.
According to Graeme Bloch: "Probably about 50 percent of pupils do not even make it through the school system and drop out before completion."
Fifteen years of government policy in the educational arena have resulted in grudging, incremental improvements in some areas, accompanied by alarming reversals or stagnation in others.
It is exactly the same in all spheres of delivery - health care, service provision (electricity, water, refuse removal, housing and so on) and job creation.
The struggle to transform conditions in education should therefore not be separated from the struggle to transform the conditions of poverty that grip the lives of so many South Africans.
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