Bult - University of the Free State

Students
Graduates should do
youth service in schools
By Anton Fisher
The government should introduce a national
youth service programme that will allow
university graduates to teach in school for two
years as a way of addressing the inequalities
learners and teachers face in our schools. This
call was made at the UFS by the founder of
the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) Zackie
Achmat during a lecture he delivered in March
as part of Human Rights Month. He said
that under a democratic government, South
Africans have a lot to be thankful for and even
more to be worried about. A particular concern
was the fact that structural inequalities are
widening in our schooling system.
“The biggest danger we face is that the
majority of African men and women in our
society, if our economy grows at the rate that
it does, will never have a permanent job in
their lifetime; and that the majority of African
children born today have a 30 percent chance
of dying of HIV / AIDS at birth. That is a
phenomenal fact that we must acknowledge
as a society. But the much bigger danger in
terms of inequality is the social death that working class
coloured and working class African children suffer when
they are in school,” he said.
According to Achmat, the greatest thing the
apartheid state did was not the affirmative action
or job reservation for whites but the investment in
the education of white children. And yet the current
democratic government is failing our children
enormously.
Outlining a number of steps that should be taken, he
said the state and private sector should make more
resources available to promote the publication of books
in African languages so that all children can learn in
their mother tongue in their formative years.
The country has to find the public resources to support
poor schools and to support teachers in such schools.
“I believe that the government should introduce a
national youth service that requires every graduate to
teach in school for at least two years and if you can
do that your fees should be reimbursed. That would
help to ensure that we begin to establish equality in the
schools.”
He called for the scrapping of Outcomes Based
Education (OBE) because it is based on the faulty
philosophical assumption that children learn from
their experience only. He said this limits working class
children in their conceptual development because
they experience not only a physical hunger but also a
hunger of intellectual dispossession.
Achmat, a political activist, called on students to take
forward the constitutional right to education and lead
a campaign for equal education because “that is the
biggest challenge facing South Africa today, in addition
to safety and security for all”.
Students
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