The ANC Women’s League wants private schools to teach the same curriculum as South Africa’s public schools, while proposed changes to the education laws aim to take away power from school governing bodies when it comes to hiring staff.
According to a report by the Sunday Times, the League said private schools must not run a “parallel education system”, and cannot be “a preserve of the haves”.
You would think in any right-thinking democracy the plan would be to raise the quality of public education to compete with that of private. It angers me so much when they create the problem then insist the problem is the fault of innocent bystanders who simply realise just how bad a problem they’ve created and have taken initiative to not have the same problem.
“I’ve broken my toys and now I’m upset that your toys aren’t broken too!”
and in their narrow-mindedness miss the point that many private schools DO present exactly the same curriculum as the state schools, CAPS is presented in 90% of the independent and smaller private schools. Its only the bigger and internationally affiliated schools that run with NCS. Even the home schoolers do CAPS. Having had kids that had to suffer through outcomes based education and then be plunged into CAPS with all the related study methods, I can only agree with Boogie’s assertion that they are bloody clueless.
Large numbers of the private schools are every bit as bad, or worse, than the government schools anyway. As far as education in South Africa is concerned, I have more or less given up on it, and will probably soon be yet another ex-teacher and refugee from the system. Unless I can find a school based on rational principles that does not insist that I have to have a post-grad teaching diploma (or worse, a B. Ed.)
