South Africa: Education hindered by Unions

Eric Cressey / 4-11-08 / 9:10 AM / Education

The teachers union of South Africa has been negotiating a salary increase for months now and has just recently finished. With this development, the Democratic Alliance of South Africa has some sharp criticisms of the Union and its effect on education in South Africa. The pass rate has been steadily falling in schools all over South Africa, showing that education there is poor at best. A spokesman for the DA said that external education unions were one of the big reasons for the compromise of educational quality in South Africa. Others, however, feel that the DA is elitist and has proposed improvements that would benefit middle-upper class white students exclusively. The DA cites some schools that performed well in spite of horribly poor circumstances, and says that teachers attitudes are to blame for the poor performance plaguing the nation.

I think this is a fascinating article, because it really gets at the heart of the issue of education. I generally think teachers deserve to be paid more and that education is extremely important, but here we see an example of where teachers seem to be negotiating for pay raises despite what seems to be shortcomings in their ability to effectively teach children. It seems to me like the teachers are more concerned with being paid (which might be true, depending on how impoverished they are) than with educating the children of their nation. Definitely they should be paid well, but they should also be good teachers and get results. I think that there is more to this issue of poor performance in South African schools than this article leads on and I am interested to see if anything more comes up about it.