Talk:Education in South Africa/Archive 1

Dates of the school year
Greetings all. The page Academic term lists countries by the date/extent of the school year. North America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania are almost exclusively represented on the list. This country has not yet been added onto the page. Would anyone be able to pop over, and give it a quick edit? Thanks, samwaltz 22:35, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Current Situation in South African Education
This article seems to give a good overview of the history of inequality in SA education. But neither the introducation, nor the body of the article mention the perception of crisis in SA education, the controversy over Outcomes-based Education, the poor pay of teachers, the shortage of teachers in maths and science, the controversies in tertiary education mergers, or anything that puts South African education in an international context. I'm looking forward to seeing it expanded and editing myself when I am more familiar with working in wikipedia.SingeMonkey (talk) 14:58, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

The statements about Verwoerd, Eiselen and the supposed influence of Nazi ideology on their thinking are completely false, and debunked by reputable historians such as Hermann Giliomee and others. It needs complete rewriting. The most important influences on Verwoerd were theories on social engineering which were popular in the United States in the earlier half of the 20th century. He was particularly influenced by the American philosopher and educator, John Dewey. It has also been suggested that the Dutch policy of verzuiling (pillarisation) influenced his policies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 124.176.84.69 (talk) 19:59, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Propaganda?
The article contains a lot of POV, or even propaganda, statements. For instance "Recently, great advances towards better Education in South Africa have been made". That is surely inappropriately political, as well as unreferenced. And probably unfounded. I also note that, for an article on education, the standard of English is poor. A suggest an edit by someone who is not close to the ANC.203.184.41.226 (talk) 05:43, 1 May 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, I don't think it's propaganda, but it was written by someone who doesn't understand what information goes into an encyclopedia article. Look at all those meaningless lists!  And the article says nothing about non-black education under Apartheid.  The article doesn't even tell you how schools were structured in the past few decades, etc.  No, this article needs a complete rewrite... and a lot of the lists and policy stuff can go. -- leuce (talk) 08:51, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Suggested overhaul of "Education in South Africa"
I suggest an overhaul of this article. Here's why, and here are some ideas.

The current article on "Education in South Africa" is 4700 words long. It consists of:


 * 2000 words (visually representing more than half of the article) devoted to statements of the education department's policies, vision, mission, strategic plan, action plan, goals, names of ministers and deputies, etc.
 * 2000 words devoted to "history", including one section for very recent history and a relatively large section about non-white education under Apartheid.
 * less than 1000 words devoted to the actual current situation in South Africa.

In my opinion, the entire set policies etc can be reduced to a single, small section of about 5 sentences long. The history section is important, although I think it can be balanced more, as it currently gives undue attention to non-white education specifically under Apartheid.

Owing to the fact that South African schooling has been modelled on British education models for almost 200 years, and the fact that the way our schools are structured logistically still mimicks that, I think a good starting point for a structure of the article would be the articles for Education in the United Kingdom, specifically England and Scotland. The legal structure of education in South Africa is much different from that of the United Kingdom, but the way schools are structured administratively is still very similar to it.

I find it odd that the current article says nothing about private schools versus public schools, very little about SAQA versus NQF, very little about provincial versus national, practically nothing about issues of home schooling and religious education, very little about extra-curriculuar activities commonly found in South African schools, very little about demographics related issues such as language and poverty, and practically nothing about current figures. The article has a lot to say about Bantu Education but nothing about e.g. the "model C" issue or about the honorary white system for diplomats, etc.

One problem with the current article is that the bulk of it that is not policy related comes from a single public domain source that itself is a compilation of information from various uncited sources, which paints a particular picture of South Africa, which even includes some legends and myths presented as fact. That source can be very useful as a springboard to search for references, but I think it is unbalanced that the bulk of the articles cites just that one source.

I would like to see more photographs. I would like to see tables and graphs that explain how grades work and how the various career paths work. An organogram that shows visually how the government departments worked from roughly 1910 until now would be extremely useful. I would love to see some statistical information on a per-province basis (and subsections with interesting information about each province's schooling situation). A historical organogram of the merging and splitting of universities would be relevant too. And I even think that a few small sections related to Bantustan/Homeland education would be relevant, since this shaped the current situation in South Africa.

What I don't want (and please tell me what you think) are the names of dozens of important people, policies, visions, etc. Dates are important, and we can name the ministers, if their names are relevant or of historical value.

We can have a section on controversy, but I think that it will be difficult as it is to keep controversiality out of the article, because the South African media takes a very active part in "policing" anything education related, and what you see in the press may therefore be more sensationalist than the reality.

So, what do you think? -- leuce (talk) 10:13, 2 May 2013 (UTC)


 * Despite the Geocities-like design, this site has some very valuable resources: http://sahistoryofeducation.webs.com/sahistofedtimeline.htm (time line 1900-1999) and http://sahistoryofeducation.webs.com/histofedsources.htm (some sources, some of them online). -- leuce (talk) 07:09, 8 May 2013 (UTC)

Edits at the top
I removed this text which was added by someone: "Schools have head masters and universities have chancellors who head their respective governing bodies. Execution of policies is the responsibility of the heads of the governing bodies of schools and universities." This is not entirely accurate, see also http://www.etu.org.za/toolbox/docs/government/sgb.html. I think a section on governing bodies would be a good idea. -- leuce (talk) 19:16, 19 September 2013 (UTC)

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