Understanding the challenges in South Africa’s education as system and teaching profession

This book considers the impact of various significant challenges to education as a profession as well as a system in South Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. With reference to the schooling system in particular, and the performance of the system as measured through pass as well as drop-out rates, the book explores, inter alia, the depth and impact of apartheid’s long legacy on the capacity of teachers to support continued professional development, as well as learner achievement and well-being. This book also explores some possibilities for developing commitment to learning and professional development. Citizenship Education, for example, is considered as one means of distilling and instilling values practice in learners as well as teachers (and by implication, the broader society). Beyond this, chapters consider the important question of what it would take to heal the devastation wrought by the first and second waves of colonialism. One impact of these waves, globally, is the commodification of knowledge. Against this backdrop, South Africa's inadequate investment in education as a common good is measured. Chronic underspending, consistent financial and management malfeasance are shown to lead to poorly maintained infrastructure and delays in the maintenance of existing foundations. These issues, as also an ineffective grasp on teacher to learner ratio complexities in South African schools, are linked to a host of other challenges which become more difficult to manage. These include consideration of classroom safety, school safety and adequate facilities (proper latrines, ablution and sport and recreational space development).

Additional consequences of waves of colonialism within the neoliberal state exert an impact on learner performance where the language of instruction is not that of the student-body but is mostly English. The impact of using first and second additional languages as language of instruction is a complexity compounded in schools catering for special needs learners. Inevitably, the combination of social ills, economic mismanagement, and poor leadership within the profession from a pedagogic and curriculum perspective, when combined with education underinvestment, affect learner performance and drop-out rates. Compound this with a global pandemic like COVID-19, and the distress of the system emerges in even starker contrast to the rights learners should enjoy to a good quality education. This makes more urgent the need for systemic as well as professional reassessment by teachers and education leaders of the situation, the context, and the possibilities for change.

The methodological approaches developed in these chapters all make use of survey and interview material pertaining to schools and education districts. The richness of the methodological approaches makes it possible, from the broad variety of perspectives, to lend credence to the assertions made in the text; they are justified through careful implementation of research methodologies which shed new light on the problems of – among others – South Africa's modern education system. The linguistic diversity of communities, as well as access by communities to deep wells of indigenous knowledge concerning science, technology and engineering, are also described in this book which explores the transformational potential of not only considering important matters regarding epistemic access but also learner success through more relevant and better understood examples.

Robert J. Balfour, Deputy Vice-Chancellor, North West University, Teaching and Learning