Johannesburg (Gauteng Province)-8/1/09

Today was a very difficult day to sit through. We arrived late yesterday and after the long flight it was hard to sleep. I do understand that a normal person wouldn’t have any problems sleeping; unfortunately, I am not 100% normal and only slept for about three hours.

We spent the day at Johannesburg University. At the campus we had presentations from Mr. Temba Tenza (Chief Director: Research and Development), Professor Lorraine Greyling (Head of Department Economics, University of Johannesburg), Mrs. Jenny Rault-Smith (Department of Education), Mr. Don Haripersad (Director of FET), and Dr. Lumengo Bonga-Bonga (Head of Department of Economics and Econometrics). From their presentations, we learned in more detail some challenges that South Africa has in Education. In essence, the entire educational system has been restructured over the course of ten years. Those of you in education know that it takes a great deal of time to restructure education effectively. Can you imagine trying to rebuild after the collapse of Apartheid in 1996?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, the curriculum needs to look the same regardless of where the school is located. So if a school is in the east and doesn’t have running water or plumbing, their curriculum is going to look the same as the schools in the city with modern amenities. Can you see some challenges here? The government and department of education is working very hard to get everything streamlined so that each child is educated the same. Questions that have been asked from education officials are: 1). Do we rebuild from scratch? and/or 2). Do we see what we can save and rebuild from this foundation? Either direction will affect the different areas separately. It has been extremely important to keep the big picture in mind and work with students to improve their education.

Go back to challenges beyond modern amenities and getting students to school. Overall, there is a low level of literacy in Africa—17% of the population has less than a seventh grade level of knowledge. If you recall, South Africa has many languages with 95% of the schools from fourth grade on being taught in English. Please keep in mind that only 8% of the learners are from English-speaking homes. What other challenges can you think may exist with these obstacles? On last tidbit of information…to print textbooks in color, it costs seven times as much as black and white. As you can see this is yet another obstacle for education.

I would like you to ponder what obstacles the United States is facing. How do these obstacles compare to the education in South Africa?

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