More than four decades since the Soweto uprising, the South African education system remains mired in crisis.

The June 16 Soweto Uprising was a watershed event in South African history. It focused global attention on the stark brutality of the apartheid education system. More than any other area, education lay at the core of the anti-apartheid struggle. Led by the country’s valiant youth, the education struggle was indissolubly tied to the quest for a free and democratic South Africa.

The primacy of education is underlined by the fact that following the unbanning of anti-apartheid political organisations and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, a process was set in motion for the African National Congress (ANC) to start negotiations with the then-ruling National Party aimed at addressing the smouldering black education crisis.

The unpalatable reality is that despite the reforms implemented by successive ANC governments since 1994, education is democratic South Africa’s biggest policy failure.    

A defining feature of apartheid education was the institutionalisation of vast racial inequalities in educational provision, resourcing, access and quality. To undo the legacy of apartheid, the government enacted a series of policy and legislative reforms to redress the widespread disparities that dogged the system and to remove infrastructural backlogs in the education sector.

At the local level, reforms have included the creation of a foundation class before the start of primary school (Grade R), changes to language policies, and initiatives to localise power so as to give school governing bodies more authority over their schools’ admission policies and codes of conduct. What’s more, some schools were turned into no-fee schools where pupils were able to receive an education free of charge, with learning materials provided to them by the school.

In spite of these reforms and the laudable progress in terms of improving access to education, particularly at the level of primary and basic education but also in secondary and higher education, many troubling features of the education system have endured 26 years after the end of apartheid. Click here for more

A catalogue of failures by Prof Mills Soko