Pretoria - Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe says South Africa’s education system needs “cutting edge” skills by educators to produce learners ready for the challenges of tertiary education, especially in the area of natural science.
“Society looks to educators as models of moral excellence and the transmitters of culture, value system and norms. Teachers are charged to socialise learners into matured and responsible adults who will in turn take up their societal places in the future,” he said.
“Through their current outlook, disposition and deportment, educators have to display the kind of well-adjusted human personality into which society is expecting learners to mature in the fullness of time.”
Motlanthe was speaking at the launch of the South African Teachers Democratic Trade Union's (SADTU) Curtis Nkondo Professional Development Institute in Polokwane on Saturday.
The institute is named after the late Curtis Nkondo, a teacher who dedicated a large part of his life to the liberation struggle.
“In confronting the debilitating system of Bantu education, Curtis Nkondo went a step further, envisioning a conception of education that was holistic and transformative,” said Motlanthe.
Curtis Nkondo belonged to a cohort of teachers who understood the value of education as being beyond narrow teaching and as a tool with which one could beat down and outsmart the apartheid regime. His persona epitomised the ultimate teacher, both in the manner he carried himself, his character and his love for learning.
The Deputy President used the occasion to convey his disappointment at what he described as acts of moral outrage that played themselves out during SA Democratic Unions’s recent march in support of its demands for the Minister of Basic Education, Angie Motshekga, to resign.
“Nothing could justify sexist, public insults levelled at the Minister of Basic Education as happened and one can only hope that this act amounted to a fleeting lapse of moral judgment.”
Motlanthe said educators had the moral, professional, intellectual and historical duty to avoid acts of behaviour inconsistent with the expectations of their profession.
He said the union could not be seen to be showing behaviour “alien to the inherently superior moral tenets of the struggle for the building of a united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and just society”.
“In fact, as the custodians of our education, SADTU more than any other social force, shoulders preponderantly more responsibility to lead the way towards a South Africa defined by high-minded values.”
Earlier this week Cabinet criticised the union after some of its members hurled insults at Motshekga during a march to the Union Buildings.
Motlanthe said he was confident that SADTU’s leadership would do everything possible to re-orient its members away from behaviour that breaks with the noble tradition of teaching. - SAnews.gov.za
