The South African Civil Society Information Service
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
A nonprofit news agency promoting social justice. Seeking answers to the question:
How do we make democracy work for the poor?
The skills gap or skills mismatch argument blames education for the lack of jobs, when instead, it is a crisis of capitalism that has caused the high levels of unemployment in South Africa, and in many other parts of the world, including Southern Europe, argues Salim Vally, co-editor of a new book, Education, Economy and Society. It's a false argument and an ideological hoax to say that we have the jobs but not the skills. Vally also challenges the conventional assumption that education...
Glenn Ashton -
We have thrown bags of money at education over the past two decades. Education consumes nearly a quarter of our total budget, close to a quarter of a trillion Rand a year. We spend more money on education than anything else. Yet despite tardy progress, meaningfully reforming the broken apartheid era education system appears to be an impossible task.
We still have some of the worst outcomes in the world as far as literacy and numeracy are concerned. We still struggle to properly teach the...
Richard Pithouse -
The road from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown winds past one luxury game farm after another. John Graham, a British soldier, drove the Xhosa people off this land, the Zuurveld, between 1811 and 1812. His soldiers burnt their homes, destroyed their crops and killed any man that resisted.
It was John Cradock, the governor of the Cape Colony, who had given Graham his orders. Cradock had some experience in these matters. He had crushed anti-colonial rebellions in Ireland and India before being...
Noting the structural problems inherent in the South African economy and high levels of graduate unemployment, SACSIS’ Fazila Farouk interviews the Vice Chancellor and Principal of WITS University, Prof. Adam Habib about higher education’s role in and contribution to South Africa’s racial and economic transformation.
Habib argues that higher education can fundamentally equalize the playing field if it is not simply the preserve of the rich. However, he contends that the...
Daphne Koller is enticing top universities to put their most intriguing courses online for free - not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. And many of the world’s top universities are obliging, including Stanford, Princeton and so on.
Koller’s free online university has 640,000 students enrolled from 190 countries. While the students gain qualifications, the professors learn valuable lessons about how learning takes place. Each keystroke, comprehension...
Glenn Ashton -
UNISA, the University of South Africa, has established an excellent reputation over its 138-year history. Even during apartheid it served everyone in the country through its open distance education model. Many past and present leaders earned their degrees whilst incarcerated for anti-apartheid activities, this fact recently receiving praise from President Zuma. There are still prisoners within the corrections system receiving UNISA tuition. UNISA extends the possibility to realise our...
