By Norm Dixon
Black education in South Africa is a state of collapse. Massive underfunding, desperate overcrowding, woeful facilities, a complete lack of textbooks, seriously underqualified teachers and government indifference have resulted in almost two-thirds of all black children who sat the 1991 matriculation exam failing to pass. The failure rate for white students is less than 10%.
Officials of the apartheid-structured Department of Education and Training (DET), which oversees the education of the black majority, concede that many of those who pass are seriously under-educated and barely literate.
The apartheid regime still spends four times as much per capita on white students as it does on blacks. Only 8% of those black kids that do matriculate are likely to get jobs.
While DET director-general Bernhard Louw continues to blame "lingering effects of the defiance campaign" and "disruption through violence and intimidation" for the poor results, they come in what was the most disruption-free year since the youth rebellion in 1976.
The African National Congress and other liberation movements have campaigned vigorously for youth to resume studies. On January 8, ANC President Nelson Mandela declared that 1992 should be a year of serious learning and effective teaching.
Speaking at the ANC's 80th anniversary in Bloemfontein, Mandela said: "If the aim of racists is to keep us ignorant and under-qualified ... we should challenge this by improving our performance even within this limited environment".
The condition of the black education system is so bad that parents who can afford to try to remove their children from DET schools. On January 9 in Johannesburg, more than 2000 black pupils were turned away from three newly established non-racial schools, administered by the "white" education department, because there was not enough room to accommodate them.
Parents, eager for their children to escape the substandard township schools, travelled tens of kilometres only to be disappointed. The southern Transvaal region of the anti-apartheid National Education Coordinating Committee (NECC) has demanded that the government abolish the segregated education system and open all schools to all pupils.
Because of a steady decline in the number of white school-age children, many schools in affluent white suburbs are empty or under-utilised. However, before such a school can accept black students, 80% of the parents in a white area must agree to the change.