Verwoerd still haunts education

by Letters Editor · Published July 15, 2009 · Updated July 17, 2009

I was disappointed that the article �School system must be reformed first� (July 1-7), while accurately analysing the reasons for racism and discrimination within higher education, fails to offer us an adequate vision for transformation of the sector.

It is not enough to expect the schooling system to adequately prepare learners for university learning. It is not enough because, as Fr Anthony Egan reminds us in the article, �apartheid created an unequal education system�. Perhaps we still really don�t get it that Verwoerd�s design for our education system has as yet not been laid to rest.

Almost two decades after the death of apartheid, our education system is still doing exactly what it was designed to do: creating a racially-segregated educated elite and a class of people trained to serve them.

We need to lay the ghost of Verwoerd and this cannot be done by tinkering with the education system, by �reforming� it as the article suggests. It takes a ghost to lay a ghost, and the vision of a pedagogy of the oppressed that Paulo Freire espoused is perhaps what is needed to lay the ghost of Verwoerd which still haunts our education system, creating poorly educated masses and a highly educated elite.

Last year, the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) hosted a colloquium for popular education at the historic Roma Church in Guguletu, where some 30 popular education activists across South Africa committed themselves to revitalising the non-formal popular education movement in the spirit of Paulo Freire.

We need to stop obsessing about formal education � SAQA, certifications, matric, SETA�s and �outcomes�. Formal education teaches conformity, not creativity and innovation.

Douglas Racionzer, Idasa, Cape Town