|
|
|
Education in South Africa: How It Works, and How It’s Struggling
It’s January, and that means the start of a new school year in South Africa. In less than a week, students (or learners, as they’re called in South Africa) and teachers will fill classrooms, hoping to embark on a new year of learning, enlightenment, and growth. It’s a good time for students to ride the momentum gained with last year’s record-breaking high school pass rate. For those of us in the United States, Canada, and other Western countries, it’s a good time to learn about the educational experiences that our young South African friends will have this year.
Primary education is mandatory in South Africa. According to the country’s Constitution, South Africa has an obligation to make education available and accessible. All South Africans have the right to a basic education, including adult basic education and further education.
School in South Africa begins in grade 0, or grade R. It’s the equivalent of our kindergarten, a time of school preparation and early childhood socialization. Grades 0 to 9 make up General Education and Training, followed by Further Education and Training (FET) from grades 10 to 12. Students either stay in high school during this time, or enter more specialized FET institutions with an emphasis on career-oriented education and training. After passing the nationally-administered Senior Certificate Examination, or “matric,” some students will continue their education at the tertiary level, working towards degrees up to the doctoral level. Over a million students are enrolled in South Africa’s 24 state-funded colleges and universities.
Chronology of African History – 20th Century (1902 – 1950)
A CHRONOLOGY OF AFRICAN HISTORY
It is the purpose of this article to provide the general reader with a comprehensive picture of world’s greatest civilization originating in Africa, a continent leading modern scholars today refer to it as the ‘the cradle of civilization’. This chronology seeks to address sophisticated and intelligent readers who had never previously read anything serious about Africa, from the earliest times to the most recent. Most black people have lost their confidence, their true identity, because their history has been neglected, falsified and sometimes concealed. Diana Crawford Carson has been instrumental in the compilation of the chronology as she spent many hours synchronizing facts from many sources and verifying the language usage. Note: the century headings generally refer to the first date mentioned. Example: an entry covering the 14th to the 18th century will be found under ’14th Century, 1300s’. The numbers in the left hand column are arbitrary, to help those using the indexes. All information has been resourced; resources are listed after the main text, just before the index.
The 20th century, 1900s, (1902-1950)
128 1902 Benin, on the west coast of near-equatorial Africa, and formerly known as Dahomey, was controlled at this time by the French.
Black Education – Women in Black History, Part 1
Black education most definitely needs more focus in its consideration of black women. Scientists like Louis B. Leakey teach that all races can be traced back to African blood. This means that black women are the mothers of the human race – period. As such, we blacks are the most ancient people on earth and, therefore, our history is the oldest. Our history is not simply thousands of years old: it is millions.
Western education would have you believe that those millions of years were spent in ignorance. This is one reason why black people need to study and interpret their own history for themselves because having such an immense history means that black women (the subject of our discussion) have had millions of years of great achievements.
I will not bore you with millions of years of history. I could not if I wanted to. Too much time has passed and, more to the point, too many invasions have occurred, resulting in burnings of massive libraries, the destruction of an immeasurable amount of records, and grossly distorted interpretations. We can be glad, however, that our ancestors recorded a great deal of their history in stone all over the world.
