Going private won't improve SA education – academics

PRIVATE schooling reproduced inequality and was not the solution to improving education in South Africa, academics said at an NMMU brainstorming session yesterday.

Titled Privatisation of Education: Selling Out the Right to Quality Public Education for All, the session saw academics challenge the increased global call to ditch public schooling and steer towards private education as a means to better education.

Encouraging South Africa to buck the trend of privatisation that has swept through the US with hundreds of public schools shut down, University of Johannesburg lecturers Salim Vally and Carol- Anne Spreen, together with Steven Klees of the University of Maryland in the US, argued that the practice widened the gap between the haves and have nots.

Going the private schooling route has been punted as the solution to achieving quality education around the world, with South Africa seemingly jumping on the bandwagon with an increase in the number of private schools, especially low-cost private institutions. - Zandile Mbabela