Cuban+way+to+literacy+for+South+Africa,+Business+Day

Business Day, Johannesburg, 27 February 2006
=Expert team to witness reading the Cuban way=


 * Sue Blaine, Education Correspondent**

A TEAM of local literacy experts left for Cuba, Venezuela and New Zealand yesterday to examine Cuba’s model for educating large numbers of illiterate adults quickly and how it has been adapted.

Education Minister Naledi Pandor has acknowledged that SA is not winning its battle against illiteracy, and that there is a need to reject aspects of government’s adult literacy education programme. A visit to Cuba last year sparked her interest in “the Cuban model”.

“We cannot be oblivious to the hard reality that our attempts to improve SA’s literacy rate have largely failed. Nor can we pretend that our current methods of fighting illiteracy are effective,” Pandor told a meeting of literacy experts in May last year, when she announced that a ministerial committee on literacy would be established.

Prof John Aitchison, head of the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s Centre for Adult Education, says it is clear “SA is not seriously eradicating illiteracy”.

The number of people over 20 who have no schooling has not changed much in the five years since they were measured at 4,5-million for Census 2001, nor has the number of people, 4-million in all, who have “some primary schooling”, he says.

Eradicating illiteracy has been a government priority since 1994 and its adult education programme was introduced in 1995.

Last May Pandor reminded experts that SA had obligations in this regard, having committed itself to a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation agreement, which includes the goal of ensuring the world’s adult illiteracy rate is reduced to about 10% by 2015.

But the wheels of government turn slowly and the ministerial committee on literacy was only recently established. It was gazetted on February 3 this year.

The team of nine is to spend the next three weeks in Cuba, Venezuela and New Zealand, and it is to submit a final report on its findings to Pandor on March 31.

While the ministerial committee may have to work quickly, this does not mean SA will see swift, radical changes in adult education, says Aitchison, who is on the ministerial team.

“Obviously, if the task team comes up with an acceptable plan, it will require a gear-up period and funds assigned to it in the next budget,” he says.

The Cuban programme is impressive at first sight. Shortly after President Fidel Castro came to power in January 1959, Cuba’s illiteracy rate plummeted from 26,3% to 3,9%. Castro implemented a mass literacy campaign in 1961 which had thousands of middle-class youths volunteer to go into rural areas to teach. Cuba has managed to maintain its high literacy rate. In 2004 the Central Intelligence Agency reported the island’s literacy rate was 97%.

The Cuban model is now being used in several countries worldwide, but it has its critics.

In SA people involved in literacy education are worried that the revolutionary fervour which drove the Cuban literacy programme is gone and few will volunteer, or even do the work, for a small remuneration. They also worry that few of SA’s illiterate adults are enticed to learn to read, write and do arithmetic without other more practical, workplace inducements.

“There aren’t hordes of people wanting to become literate. What they want is to change their lives.

“You have to get enough into an adult basic education and training (Abet) programme to do that; you need a full package that includes training on microenterprise,” says Pat Dean, head of KwaZulu-Natal’s Operation Upgrade, a nongovernmental body involved in adult education for nearly 40 years.

Dean says her organisation has learnt the hard way, that using volunteers does not work because as soon as people find paying work, or better paying work, they take it and leave.

However, the Cuba model’s informality is of interest to experts who complain that SA’s adult training programme is often too formal, especially when gaining a formal literacy qualification — as happens in SA’s system — does not guarantee a leg up into the world of work.

“You can’t promise a certificate will open the doors of paradise. For those living under the poverty line, we need a different approach to the formal one.

“Here the Cuban model may help,” says Wolfgang Leumer, local head of the Institute for the International Co-operation of the German Education Association.

SA’s high unemployment rate creates another problem for illiterates, says Aitchison. Because of the formality of the adult training programme and the skills development levy, a tax of 1% of payroll which is turned over to Sectoral Education and Training Authorities (Setas) — established to oversee training in various economic sectors, that is training of those already employed — those with poor schooling and often no employment, are often left out of the training loop.

“In SA there are thousands of people with high-school education who are unemployed and literate, so why employ illiterates that you then have to train?” Aitchison asks.

It is perhaps because of this that those Setas that were given a second five-year tenure by Labour Minister Membathisi Mdladlana last March have not thrown much money the way of basic education and training for adults.

“Most Setas argue that companies should top up the amount they have allocated to adult education, but companies argue that they pay their skills levy and can’t budget more money.

“This means that nothing, in effect, happens,” says Andrew Miller, CEO of Project Literacy, SA’s only national nongovernmental organisation devoted to adult education.

Vusi Mabena, chairman of Business Unity SA’s standing committee on social policy, says his experience as an adult education instructor for Afrox showed him that even those employed adults who had education offered to them at work were often not interested.

“I had to hunt for people, and they’d say ‘What is it going to do for me?’ Here’s a man who was denied education in the past. Now he’s 45, and he’s told, ‘Lets go to Abet’. And he says, ‘You’re joking!’ A very small number grab the opportunity,” Mabena says.

Added to the mix is the serious problem of a 50% drop-out rate.

Last year the education department said it would be investigating the causes for this enormous drop-out rate, but a list of questions sent to the education department’s acting director of adult education, Vernon Jacobs, has not been answered


 * From: http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/national.aspx?ID=BD4A161074 **

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