Opening doors of Learning and Culture

The Education Rights Project is an important initiative by the Wits Education Policy Unit. It is a tool to educate and help communities organise around their right to free and quality education. This project works with learners and parents faced with a range of violations of education rights. Ranging from assisting parents and learners who have to contend with schools, which illegally withhold report cards of learners who are too poor to pay school fees, to assisting schools and communities to access free school transport for learners that walk long distances to schools.

In a country where half of the population lives under the poverty line, it is anyone’s guess where poor and working class will find the money for school fees, uniforms, excursions and lunches at school. Is this not one of admitting the sad fact that quality education is only for the rich?

It is clear to me the situation just described will persist for as long government continues to pursue the neo-liberal agenda. And for as long as ordinary people are unable to organise and challenge this agenda. What the ERP is doing in KwaZulu-Natal is to run workshops together with a layer of education activists in various communities. Schools are regarded as a primary site to conscientize and organise learners, educators and parents around the right to free and quality education.

We are mindful of the fact that decisions regarding whether or not a school should charge fees and how much fees is often made by a few people who form part of the School Governing Body (SGB). Too often parents and other affected members of the community are not told that a decision to charge school fees can only be made by a general meeting of parents. It happens also that SGB members themselves do not fully understand their functions and powers, and find themselves having to succumb to the pressure of the school principal who wants the fees to pay the utility bills of the school. Instead of putting pressure on parents and learners, school principals and educators should become agents of the people, not of the state they should demand that the state should allocate more resources to their schools.

It is vital to get our educators to understand that they are the ones who are best placed to defend and protect the rights of children to human dignity and to knowledge. This is especially important in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which weakens even further the thin social fabric which holds together the lives, dreams and hopes of children. It makes absolutely no sense therefore that those who are duty-bound to protect them on account of school fees emotionally and physically abuse children. But this does help to explain why there are so many children on the streets during school hours.

This is an important project for all of us in social movements. We must embrace this initiative. We are all fighting for social justice through different programmes. Our programmes may seem divergent. All these programmes, however, will encounter the issue of education and will have to address it at some point. The ERP calls for assistance from serious organisations and individuals to take the issue of education rights and the campaign for free and quality education to all communities where its limited resources cannot reach. It is through such a united front that we can hope to end illiteracy.

Poor people will never benefit from any social or economic development as long as they are kept illiterate or semi-literate. We must face the fact that if the project of neo-liberalism, whose components include cost recovery for basic services, is not challenged it will will continue to frustrate the longstanding demand for the doors of learning and culture to be opened to all.

Xolani Tsalong works with the KwaZulu-natal Education Rights Project and is a member of the Ethekweni Social forum and is activist in anti-hIV/ AIdS movement.