Study on violence in South African schools shocks!

About 1.8 million of all pupils in South Africa between Grade 3 and Grade 12 (15.3 %) experienced violence in one or other form while they were in school. This and other findings were revealed in a Report of a recent national study on school violence by the Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention in Johannesburg. 
To read [...]

Save the OBE system in South African schools urgently!

South African schools are in a mess because of the wrong manner in which Outcomes Based Education (OBE) was applied. This led Joey van Niekerk to write an open letter to the South African Minister of Education in the Beeld newspaper on April 17, 2008.  
In this letter Van Niekerk praises the points of departure [...]

Majority of SA school leavers are functionally illiterate

Only 1 out of 29 matriculants are functionally literate after matric, according to adv. Paul Hoffman SC, director of the Centre for Constitutional Rights of the F.W. de Klerk Foundation. [Hoffman describes functional literacy as the means to have the reading and writing skills necessary for everyday living and the workplace]. In an article on [...]

South African Education in a mess

Presenting the latest country report in Cape Town last week, SA Institute for Race Relations (SAIRR) chief executive John Kane-Berman claimed that up to 80 % of the country’s public schools are dysfunctional despite a decade of incremental increases in public spending on the education system. The  education system is also failing to produce the [...]

Faster Internet for South African Universities

SANREN goes live! SANREN’s new 10 gigabytes-per-second service went live in Johannesburg on 31 March, connecting the main University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) campus and three University of Johannesburg campuses to an optical fibre ring that starts and ends at a location called the Reefhead Gateway. SANREN, the South African National Research Network system will expand university bandwidth 35-fold [...]

Centenary Research Indaba 2008

The Faculty of Education at the University of Pretoria, South Africa will be hosting a Centenary Research Indaba on the 11th of April at the Groenkloof Campus of the University. The theme of the Research Indaba will be “100 Years of Knowledge: Reflecting on the Paving of Ways into the Future”.
To view the programme and abstracts [...]

Spady: OBE in SA: Time to End the Confusion

In an article published in the South African Journal for Science and Technology, Dr William Spady argues that OBE in South Africa has failed, and concludes: ‘South Africa should stop referring to OBE in any form. OBE never existed in 1997, and has only faded farther from the scene as C2005 was replaced by the [...]

Spady: Dis genoeg: UGO in SA

Dr William (Bill) Spady, bekende op die gebied van Uitkomsgebasseerde Onderrig, lewer ‘n pleidooi in sy artikel wat in die nuutste nommer van die Suid-Afrikaanse Tydskrif vir Natuurwetenskap en Tegnologie verskyn het, dat die verwarring oor uitkomsgebaseerde onderwys (UGO), wat klaaglik in Suid-Afrika misluk het, beëindig moet word.
Vir die volteks van die artikel, kliek hier

Racism Committee Members announced by SA Minister of Education

The South African Minister of Education, Mrs. Naledi Pandor, announced yesterday the establishment of a Ministerial Committee on “Progress towards Transformation and Social Cohesion and the Elimination of Discrimination in Public Higher Education Institutions”. The primary purpose of the committee will be to investigate the nature and extent of discrimination in public higher education institutions, with a [...]