Johannesburg - Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe has called for an increased focus on the country’s education system, saying it needs to produce a capable generation of young people armed with the requisite skills geared towards the needs of the economy.
Speaking at the University of the Witwatersrand Business School Alumni annual general meeting on Monday evening, Motlanthe said government should do more to mobilise its resources, and the private sector also needed to get involved.
Quoting the 2012/13 Global Competitiveness Index, which ranks South Africa as the world’s fourth worst in education, Motlanthe said modern societies succeeded or failed based on the extent to which their education systems responded to development imperatives.
As a result, he suggested that the country needed to review the road travelled in the education system and look at how the past can be corrected. He said developing teachers, recruiting the best people and ploughing resources into teaching colleges that produce quality, cutting-edge teachers were some of the areas that should be looked into.
“Economic productivity is the fruit of long term investment in the national education system. Short of an education system geared to the particular developmental needs of the country, we will be hard put breaking into high-level economic productivity that can extricate us from the inter-generational cycle of poverty.
“This reality places enormous responsibility on government and all its social partners to pay particular attention to education, especially at the primary and secondary school levels,” Motlanthe said.
Also speaking at the event, Wits vice-chancellor Adam Habib, who described the university as the most politically vibrant, said it would actively place the institution at the centre of debates.
Habib said top of the country’s education challenges were teacher skills, teacher discipline and a need to attract the best candidates to the profession.
Motlanthe echoed Habib’s sentiments, saying universities must be at the centre of innovation. They should also increase their cooperation with the government, especially in research and in sharpening skills and the knowledge base of the country.
“More than any social force, universities are well-positioned to contribute to South Africa’s competitive and knowledge-based economy,” he said.
The Deputy President said the National Development Plan was the generally acceptable “road map” which lays out the parameters within which each social partner can make a contribution towards the achievement of our shared vision of poverty reduction, stimulating economic growth, effecting economic transformation and creating employment.
But for the country to transform, the education system should be partly predicated on the role of an engaged private sector.
“While government has to lead the way in all respects, we also need the private sector and higher education to help us clear the way to the future in keeping with the edicts of our vision: to create a united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist, just and prosperous society.” - SAnews.gov.za
