The Act places great power in the hands of the national government. The DA Minister could use this for a temporary good, but has instead chosen to carry forward the ANC's policies.
After much debate around the BELA Act and its centralisation of power, one might wonder exactly what the DA’s Minister of Basic Education, Siviwe Gwarube, has planned to make use of the extraordinary centralisation of education policymaking that has been handed to her.
What the DA have done in just about every department they have taken over, is to endorse ANC policy wholesale, instead of drafting their own. In the case of basic education, this is not merely laziness, but an enthusiasm for the ANC’s vision, and consequently can be treated as a rather vicious betrayal of their voter base.
While the ANC has engaged in political theatre over Gwarube’s failure to attend the signing ceremony and her party’s less-than-supplicant attitude towards ANC-aligned public sector labour unions, the minister was forthright about her opinion that establishment figures should disregard public criticism of the Act, and implied that the courts are meddlesome outsiders who shouldn't be a part of the process, since it is much better to have a uniform policy not subject to local-context-based exceptions.
For now, the offending sections of the Act, which strip school governing bodies of their right to determine standards and language policy, have had their promulgation delayed, thanks to the intervention of Solidariteit.
But the Department has nonetheless already established policy in anticipation of its enactment, and Gwarube appears to be happy to implement the ANC policy established prior to the formation of the current coalition, having put out no statements to the contrary, nor issuing her own policies, aside from financial reforms.
A threat to unity
Hugo Kruger, a nuclear engineer and a consistently lucid policy analyst, has explained in some decent detail why, whatever the actual legal structure of the administration, Afrikaans, and indeed any home-language, should be an important priority for any country’s education system.
He cites the Gerwal Commission, set up by Thabo Mbeki, and subsequently ignored, which promotes the preservation of Afrikaans to preserve the bonds in the country.
It should go without saying that Afrikaners now, especially since the rise of the Solidariteit movement, have less need for parliamentary representation than ever, and increasingly are looking to their non-state (they could even latently be called parallel-state) representatives.
The Movement has the capacity to potentially provide a great deal of low-cost private schooling in Afrikaans, but for now have been building from the top down, with their technicons and universities, which are already looking to be world-class institutions.
While Afrikaners are doubtless capable of building their own institutions, I consider the severing of remaining community and institutional ties at the school level to be a tragedy, and so I agree that the desires of the black nationalists and the leftists need to be fought. The transition to the private sector will definitely hurt.
If you are on the left, you may well say “fine, then you don’t need public schools” or “bugger you Jack”. Perhaps. But remember, when there is nothing left tying the Afrikaners as an ethnic group to the state, and if there is no hope for a decent education in English, many Anglos will pivot to Afrikaans schools and institutions too, as I am preparing to do for my own children by raising them to speak Afrikaans.
This is a recipe for secession and fragmentation. As an advocate for greater division and devolution of powers, I would not be all that strongly opposed to this, even if change can be unsettling.
But for our political opponents, it is worth pointing out that victory in all matters goes not to the disorganised majority, but the organised minority, and one can always catch more flies with honey.
For a happy Union, one should be able to embrace consensual social intercourse.
Policy context
That said, it is time to turn to the policy at hand. Gwarube has undersigned (unedited) her ANC predecessor’s resuscitation of Thabo Mbeki’s 2003 policy (which can be found here). It also references the 1997 policy statement, which can be found here. Angie Motshekga’s prior statement, which is all but identical, can be found here.
The department, under the DA, has chosen to lean into home language instruction, and is rolling out the policy in the Eastern Cape as a pilot. Under the framework, mathematics and science will be taught in African languages for pupils up to Grade 7, marking a shift away from the conventional reliance on English after Grade 3.
This reform is being piloted in the Eastern Cape. According to the DBE, students who switch to English as the language of instruction in Grade 4 often struggle, creating a persistent achievement gap compared to peers taught in their home language. The language media they are implementing are Xhosa and Sotho, with no mention of Afrikaans, which has six times the number of speakers in the province as Sotho.
That would not necessarily be cause for alarm, since there are several Afrikaans schools in the western part of the province which have a long pedigree, having been built up by the former state and sustained by the local communities into the present.
The implementation capacity for African languages has yet to be rebuilt after the collapse of the separate development policies of the old days, which was in many ways inadequate for modern society, though the Anglicisation process was inarguably throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and may have led to a negative pressure on literacy rates.
The numbers of single-medium schools for each language were reported in 2020 as follows:
But the policy explicitly does not recognise Afrikaans as a native language, and consequently does not regard it as worthy of recognition by the policy. To quote from the FW de Klerk Foundation’s report on the context of this matter,
“One of South Africa’s official languages, Afrikaans, has elicited negative comment in the courts because it is supposedly the language of apartheid and of repression […] the right of Afrikaans-speaking South Africans to education in the language of their choice, at university level, has been almost extinguished, while their right to education in Afrikaans at school level is under growing threat […] The experience of students at Stellenbosch University in 2021 and 2023 who were prohibited from speaking Afrikaans, even in private conversations, during the orientation process was a flagrant violation of [students’ rights…] Toward the end of 2022, the Khampepe Report recommended that the use of Afrikaans at Stellenbosch University should be further curtailed.”
In this context, the promotion of home languages should be carefully regarded. The argument that dual-medium education is the most equitable means for structuring language policy for Afrikaans schools is belied by the experiences of existing institutions which have endured this curtailment, such as Stellenbosch in the above block-quote.
The loss of school governing body oversight will undoubtedly have an extremely negative impact.
All relevant policy documents emphasise a priority for “indigenous” languages, which is a distinct concept from “official” languages, since English and Afrikaans have official status, but are explicitly not considered indigenous. Therefore any reference to indigeneity must necessarily be considered an explicit exclusion of Afrikaans.
There is a small grain of hope here, in that the flagrant targeting of Afrikaans for exclusion, which is hard to fight in the context of a lingua franca policy which implements only English, can only be construed as discrimination in the context of a native language policy, and may still have some chance of success in the court.
The last coffin nail
What is of a much more severe concern, is the utter destruction of standards. Robbing the school governing bodies of their powers to determine admissions policy exposes them to the egalitarian approach of the national government, which abhors any sort of elitism or excellence by anyone in any area.
We have become notorious internationally for our absolutely awful education standards, where children are allowed to pass with only 30% knowledge of their course material, and are often passed without even meeting those bare standards.
The reason we still have a few schools capable of producing intelligent and competent graduates, is that they can ruthlessly filter out the unruly and incapable who drag down the quality of education for everyone else, and these last bastions of education are guarded by the school governing bodies, who use the imposition of higher school fees, Afrikaans medium, and academic standards, to keep disruptive, uneducated and unintelligent students out.
The consequences of relaxing these standards is the collapse of not only schools, but entire neighbourhoods, as parents seek to place their children where they can be educated.
But the standards imposed on private schools are designed to keep low-income families from affording private education. The schools are mandated to provide sports facilities which are of comparable quality to those provided by the best schools built in the previous century, which even in the best case scenario, take up 2/3rds of the school budgets.
In my research for Western Cape devolution two years ago, I spoke with private schooling entrepreneur, Tom Sutherland.
He has created a working model of high school education in Kenton-on-Sea, referred to as the “lean schooling” model, which abolishes all non-academic elements of the school, and makes use of technologically minimal tools (e.g., blackboards instead of screens and projectors). His cost estimates run as follows:
But this is already the absolute least he could theoretically get away with. Only by abandoning nationally legislated standards for sports facilities, could any reasonably lean model be seriously adopted in the private sector.
He models this on the Chinese, who often rent classroom space in unconventional places, such as malls, storage units or office blocks, and manage to achieve globally competitive results for lower income pupils.
As tempting as it is to many people, education has to be in-person, not online, as many of us have learned during the covid lockdowns. Curriculum distribution is scalable, but supervision and assessment are not; thus, quality education simply cannot be delivered online.
The assessment aspect is vulnerable to the unreliability of low-cost remote work, which is often done by young and inexperienced freelancers. Private institutions have the advantage of being able to tap into older, retired teachers who are not employable under the mandatory retirement ages imposed by national authorities.
Ultimately however, national legislation will have to be changed if a more permanent arrangement is to be made, or if legacy public schools are to be rescued.
The horse and the rider
One of the core issues here is that the DA is enticed by the opportunity to wield power, and as such do not regard the legislative reforms to be inherently bad.
In the best possible outcome, the DA-run department could actually be relatively even-handed, and honour the wishes of the school governing bodies regarding standards and language policy. This is not even particularly unrealistic.
However, the department will not remain in the DA’s hands for long, and speaking realistically, Gwarube does not appear in any way to find fault with ANC policy.
Their track record of forcing radically anti-white education policies on the Western Cape, and of pushing transgenderism, not only in schools, but even in hospitals, has demonstrated that the party does not have the best interests, or even any kind of interests, of their voters in mind.
At present, the Minister is focused on relieving the Western Cape from the budget crisis which is forcing them to let go of several thousand teachers. Instead of using the opportunity to strip out bad teachers who harm childhood development, they intend to assist the provincial sphere to shore up the tenure of union members.
One may convince oneself one is in control of a wild horse if you enjoy the way he is running. But that only informs us that the rider has no intention of slowing or changing the horse’s course.
