Addressing education crisis after Covid

• Published date: 26 April 2024
• Author: Lukhanyo Mangona
• Publication title: Cape Argus (Cape Town, South Africa)

In the ensuing days, the majority of us lived with anxiety, fearing not only for our lives but also how we would feed our children as we lost our jobs or sources of income

No one in my sphere of influence even mentioned the repercussions this would have on the already ailing education system. In fact, we, as parents, became spectators as the debate raged on about the reopening of schools and how that would take shape.

I deliberately refer to our pre-Covid education as ailing because our educational shortcomings were well-documented before the pandemic. Experts spoke of the impact on our education system with little mention that it was already ailing, and what Covid did was to further exacerbate this.

As parents, we must not be surprised by being rendered spectators because we know that in educational conversations, our contribution is limited to financial matters, and if we are lucky, we are scapegoated whenever academic conversations arise. There is a veil of secrecy surrounding the goings-on in the South African classroom. Any talk about the South African classroom is buried in academic publications, which are largely inaccessible.

The people who first broached the subject of South African classrooms in public are the good folks at Equal Education in their two-part publication, published in 2015, and aptly titled, “Taking Equal Education into the Classroom”. The first part deals with Equal Education’s research: the trajectory of teaching in South Africa from the past to the second decade of the millennium; an audit of the teaching profession; teacher absence in class; and, the debate on whether teaching should be an essential service.

The second part deals with the roundtable contribution from a panel of experts. Topics range from: thoughts on teachers; input on teacher accountability; looking at systemic tests; the allocation of teachers in post-apartheid South Africa; whether the problem lies with teachers or their training; teacher education; and, walking side-by-side with teachers. When I had a chance to read this publication at the...