ZUMA BROWN-NOSING CHINA

ZUMA BROWN-NOSING CHINA

Stes de Necker

Last year, the South African Government signed an agreement with China to roll out a Mandarin programme over the next decade, while in March 2015 the state gazetted Mandarin to be listed as a second additional language.

While teachers are still coming to terms with the relatively new CAPS curriculum, piling more into the system would make it harder to get the basics right.

South Africa is still coming to terms with introducing indigenous languages in our schools and it is totally idiotic to introducing Mandarin when the schools can’t even teach English, Afrikaans or any other indigenous languages properly.    

It seems Zuma wants to make South Africa another Chinese province!

It is glaringly obvious that Zuma and the ANC Government are totally out of touch with the problems at grass roots level.

Children learning English in rural areas are already struggling, not because they aren’t intelligent but because they lack basic resources such as libraries and proper education facilities.

In his speech in Durban on Wednesday 19 August 2015, the Vice-chancellor and Rector of the University of the Free State pulled no punches saying the state’s declared intention to offer Mandarin at South African schools was nothing more than “political gat kruiping (brown-nosing)”.

While falling short of calling for a complete overhaul of the education system, Jansen said educationists had allowed “failure to become the new norm”.

Known for his bluntness and dislike of political correctness, he said one university in the province “continued to dish out a type of Bantu education”.

“You have all become complacent with this rubbish we call education. You have become institutionalised by keeping a dysfunctional system afloat.”

However, while acknowledging that the universities had challenges, he said the “base of education is extremely weak”.

“We need a long-term plan to get out of this mess. We should be thinking like Singapore who look 20 years ahead, but instead we only see tomorrow. Our role models are also these dysfunctional people in Parliament, when they should be Steve Biko or Robert Sobukwe. Instead we are training barbarians who are racist and sexist. They may be trained in a subject or career, but they are not educated.”

He said the violent demonstrations held at universities annually by students was the result of a “lack of education”, and was not entirely the students’ fault because they had not been given the education required to make rational decisions.

“The country had a “lazy culture”, investing heavily in education but obtaining poor results. Resources would be better spent on developing indigenous languages.”