It was joy all round as our little ones returned to school yesterday. The beginning of a new school year always comes with the hope and belief that we will do better as a nation in educating our young. Although in this province there is still disappointment after the Eastern Cape came bottom of the list in terms of matric outcomes per province, the average increase in the national pass rate should give us some encouragement.
It is not about competing with other provinces, even though not being No 9 would make us all feel much better, but about improving from last year’s performance. That journey towards improvement began yesterday. It began not just with this year’s intake of matric pupils, but, most importantly, with pupils at lower grades.
Educationists argue that the foundation phase is the most important in a child’s development. Hence the effort to improve the Eastern Cape matric results should not be limited to this year’s cohorts but must include renewed programmes, especially in poor and rural areas, to encourage the culture of reading at a young age. In a country where too many households are either child-headed or heavily dependent on the elderly, this can seem like a daunting task.
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But with joint efforts involving schools, other government departments, religious groupings and community networks, great progress can be made. In the early 1970s, inspired by the then-emerging political philosophy of Black Consciousness, as espoused by the likes of Steve Biko, various communities around the Eastern Cape and beyond started running self-help programmes whose main aims were to increase access to both health and education. In an SA free of apartheid, there ought to be more leeway for communities to revive such programmes and draw in both the state and civil society as partners.
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