President calls for decolonisation of SA’s education system

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JEREMY MAGGS: Overnight, President (Cyril) Ramaphosa calling on teachers to join students and learners in the debate on what he calls the decolonisation of education. Ramaphosa says many countries on the continent need to deal with the impact of this concept, which has plunged them into crisis.

Basil Manuel is the executive director of the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa (Naptosa), and he’s with me now. How do you firstly define a decolonised education system and what would be the core components compared to the current way of doing things?

BASIL MANUEL: Well, the Naptosa view that we have constantly put out there is one where we see the Eurocentric nature of our curriculum first of all changing. But also, even the structure needs to be looked at differently.

But however, we identify that, our very teachers have been schooled in a system that has perpetuated this colonised type of system. So they too, and their thinking about education in a new world needs to be addressed as well.

JEREMY MAGGS: How does the current system manifest itself in the classroom then?

BASIL MANUEL: Currently, our systems are very much still talking to, in South Africa’s context, the European …, where we have not even started addressing the historical education developments within South Africa, starting with the Iron Age, where we ourselves had smelting plants and so on, and those are unrecognised as though they didn’t happen.

But more so too, we concentrate more on European history and in latter years American history and things like that. We, in fact, need to be looking at the continent first, develop a strong sense of the African culture within our education system.

Then of course you can’t ignore the other, it has to be inclusive and developmental, but with one that only looks at what happens on the other side, you then tend to create the impression that good is Europe or America, and then secondary comes Africa.

JEREMY MAGGS: It’s extraordinary that no changes have been made after almost 30 years of democracy.

BASIL MANUEL: I think I would be unfair if I said no changes have been made, but I think we must recognise that change has been very, very slow. Primarily also because the very people who are championing education, people like myself included, have been schooled in a system that is different to what we are proposing.

So changing the thinking of people is far more difficult than making structural and such other changes. However, there is good intent currently flowing around and I think that the pace will improve.

JEREMY MAGGS: So what specific changes need to be made in the short term then as far as the curriculum is concerned?

BASIL MANUEL: We have proposed that we need to start looking at the curriculum as a whole, first of all, and discuss what we see as the deficit in terms of decolonising it because you can’t simply just start scratching out things. We’ve also got to ensure that we start with things like language.

Jeremy, one of the biggest problems in South Africa is that we always complain about the performance of children, but we don’t take into account that one of the biggest colonising heritages has been that we are sitting in an English world.

And English is extremely important, but nowhere in the world are children taught in a tongue that is not their mother tongue.

Unless we address the mother tongue issue, and for Naptosa that is first prize, let’s look at how we address in a much greater, more comprehensive way mother tongue instruction, and a transition at a stage where research is showing would be more appropriate because we know we can’t forget English because it’s the language of not only the economy but also jurisprudence and the world. If we start with language, we certainly will find it easier to address some of the other things.

JEREMY MAGGS: So what kind of training then, and I guess resources, will teachers need to effectively deliver the concept that you’re talking to me about?

BASIL MANUEL: One of the biggest stumbling blocks at the moment is that we don’t have enough teachers who can teach in the various vernacular and that is the biggest stumbling block. As unions, we’ve been addressing universities and as recent as last week we were talking about the curricular at the universities where there are very few universities that are even offering African languages as subjects or subjects that can be taken as majors, to a major level. That is where our first problem lies because we’ve got to create the pool of teachers.

Already it says to you that this doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a couple of years to train a teacher, but we are sitting on the edge of a possible shortage of teachers.

So now we are saying to our Funza Lushaka, which is a bursary system within the department, let us start directing that to the needs we are going to have. One of those needs is language teachers, teachers of the languages of our learners. The fact that I speak Zulu doesn’t mean I’m a Zulu teacher. We are underscoring that.

JEREMY MAGGS: So that is a starting point. But you will concede, Basil, that moving towards a decolonised system is also socio-politically tricky because you would need to ensure the representation and inclusion of diverse cultures and histories in South Africa. That could be contested terrain, surely.

BASIL MANUEL: It is vastly contested and let me illustrate that by example, we have seen that there is an unusual attack even on Afrikaans and we are saying, what are we doing, if we want to talk about mother tongue instruction, Afrikaans must be protected in the same way. It mustn’t be elevated to be different and special. We want Afrikaans not to be lost as a mother tongue.

We want others to become like Afrikaans. As you said, it’s so contested. People see this as a protectionism. Whilst we are saying it’s not protectionism, it is part of the bigger plan that you bring the others up. You don’t destroy what you currently have.

JEREMY MAGGS: Basil Manuel, thank you very much indeed, executive director of the National Professional Teachers’ Organisation of South Africa.