Education is not the filling of a bucket but the starting of a fire.
— W B Yeats
Let me be the first person to say this: We are no longer the "New South Africa". As of today, we are just another country in this global community trying to do the very best for ourselves and our children.
I don't know whether many of us are able to remember this sort of thing, but I can recall the names and faces of every single teacher who taught me from kindergarten upwards.
Some were brilliant. Some were prematurely grey from having to deal with the likes of me. Some had tennis player forearms from administering shots across our rears with rulers. They all worked exceedingly hard, and were paid relatively poorly, but were almost without exception highly respected.
Sometime in the 1993, the strike by teachers now consolidated under the banner of the South African Democratic Teachers' Union put an end to the notion of education as a calling and introduced the idea of teachers as workers in a factory. Their raw material is children, their finished product is adults. And like factory workers, they were entitled to basic conditions of employment such as maximum working hours, minimum wages, and the like.
Now these are not unreasonable things to want and few of us would argue that for Sadtu to have aggressively campaigned for these things was a bad idea. But somewhere down the line towards fairer working conditions, Sadtu completely forgot its responsibilities towards our children.
Today, education in this country is a basket-case. And nearly all of the blame can be laid on Sadtu's doorstep.
I can see the flames of ire flickering across the educational landscape already. So, in order to avoid any misunderstanding or unpleasantries, let me express myself clearly and unambiguously: Sadtu, I think you guys are a disgrace. You strike at the drop of a hat, you will do anything to avoid actually teaching, and your idea of quality education is to reduce every school in the country to the lowest common denominator — yours.
I returned to my country weeks before the elections in 1994 with a daughter then less than a year old, and I've kept a very close watch on education because of that vested interest. I keep asking myself what I can do to ensure that my child will receive the best possible education so that she will be able to hold her own in the global community of the next century.
There are a number of things I've discovered. Individual attention, a greater emphasis on computer aided instruction, and firm grounding in science and maths are all prerequisites. Longer school days and fewer holidays round off the picture.
Nearly every civilised country is taking these issues seriously. American parents send their kids to summer school. In South Korea, parents club together to arrange tutors for their children after an eight-hour school day. I could go on ...
Since Sadtu has been allowed to control the education agenda, we've had the number of schooldays per pupil plunge, dramatic increases in pupil/teacher ratios, and Sadtu members refusing to work a seven-hour day. I could go on ...
But what really pisses me off is when you Sadtu numbskulls volunteer yourselves as champions of democracy by threatening to strike over political issues that the rest of us feel as strongly about, but are responsible enough to not want to sabotage the country by not putting in a full day's work. You, on the other hand, have no qualms whatsover about calling for "rolling mass action" — which is just another way of saying that you will be goofing off for a few weeks instead of doing what we are paying you to do; teach.
Professor Kader Asmal, new national minister of education, is a workaholic from the old school of teaching who understands that excellence is its own reward. If he takes you on, believe me when I say that no parent in this country will stand in his way.