Abstract
This research focuses on School fees at public schools in Gauteng: implications for the provision of education.
The demand for free education is no longer one made by revolutionaries or radicals only. Even the World Bank – key architects of user fees – have come around to this way of thinking, seeing that charging school fees for primary education is bad for development.
The subject of school fees has been in the news because of the disruption of schooling by the Pan African Student Organisation in Tskane (Gauteng) and Balfour (Mpumalanga). In Tskane, students demanded a reduction in fees from R300-00, (Secondary Schools) and R120-00 (Primary Schools) to R50-00 and R25-00 respectively.
The Global Campaign for Education (GCE) has called for the total scrapping of school fees over the next three years. Cosatu and Sadtu President sang from the same hymn book, “education fees are a tax on the poorest and must be dropped” (The Educators’ Voice, 2002b:2).
The Freedom Charter, a beacon of the revolution, was drafted by popular assembly in Kliptown in 1955 by the African National Congress Alliance. Declaring, “the doors of learning and culture shall be opened,” it championed the right to education, which shall be free, compulsory, universal and equal for all, and adult illiteracy shall be ended by a mass state education plan. (The Educators’ Voice, 2002b:3)
The Reconstruction Development Plan document based on the Freedom Charter, which served as the African National Congress-led alliance electoral platform for the 1994 elections, stated that the democratic Government must ensure that all children go to school for at least 10 years. The ten-year compulsory general education cycle should proceed from a pre-school reception year to the present grade nine. The Government must phase in compulsory education as soon as possible. To achieve this objective the Government must rebuild and expand our schools. Classes of 50-80 or more learners are unacceptable. “We must ensure that no class exceeds 40 learners by the end of the decade.”
In many developing countries the levying of school fees prevents children access to school. Even in countries where primary education is meant to be free, the cost of buying books and uniforms means that many poor families simply cannot afford to educate their children. The World Bank recently called for the elimination of school fees. Immediate action to increase resources to countries which have education plans and a three to five fold increase of donor funding for primary education is needed (The Educators’ Voice, 2002b:3).
A report on school funding and resourcing commissioned by former National Education Minister Professor Kader Asmal, found worrying indications of disregard by Education Department employees of the rights of the poor. The report found that while discrimination against impoverished learners was not widespread, it was common enough to merit intervention.
As the “new” South Africa forges ahead with rebuilding and transforming its education system following the end of apartheid in 1994, the levying of school fees has emerged as a highly controversial issue – one that resonates in many developing countries around the world. Such fees are regarded by many South Africans as exacerbating a problem – a plagued national system of education funding that falls short of meeting even the most basic needs of the nation’s historically disadvantaged learners. Most of those learners are black children who make up roughly 90 percent of our learner population (The Educators’ Voice, 2002b:3).
However, to many education officials and principals, school fees are a necessary financial tool as the government tries to address the severe education inequities such as crumbling classrooms and insufficient textbooks that are reminders of apartheid’s hateful legacy. The government does not have the money to bring all schools up to standard. A coalition of activist, researchers, educators, and lawyers are now using school fees as a rallying cry for an effort, they hope, will spur more substantive improvements to South Africa’s ailing schools.
The goal of the Education Rights Projects is to ensure that all children, especially the nation’s indigent youth, have access to a free basic education (http://www.epnet.com). In addition to school fees, the group plans to address the dearth of proper school buildings and teaching resources, the hardships experienced by rural students, and the sexual harassment of and violence to female students. Katarina Tomanevski, the special rapporteur on the right to education in the United Nations office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said that it is possible to eliminate school fees, noting that Uganda and Tanzania abolished them in recent years. The World Bank is strengthening its opposition to school fees because countries that charge fees cannot ensure that poor children still have access to school, said Robert S. Prouty, the bank’s leading education specialist. Daria Roithmayr, an associate professor of law at the University of Illinois, who wrote a paper on school fees, contends that school fees violate the South African Constitution which guarantees the children’s basic right to education. School fees also contradict international law, including the Convention On The Rights Of The Child, an international human rights treaty that requires governments, including South Africa, to make primary education “free” for all (http://www.epnet.com).
Prof. T.C. Bisschoff