Afrikaans is not under attack: education MEC
MEC for education Panyaza Lesufi has assured Afrikaans speakers that their language isn’t under attack, and that the department’s desire for Afrikaans-only schools to become dual-medium is to promote non-racialism.
Speaking to members of the community, including AfriForum members, Lesufi said that schools should be for everyone, and that Afrikaans-only schools were a barrier for black children to have access to quality education.
Afrikaans schools were almost exclusively white, and it was time for that to change he said.
“I want to build a nonracial education for all of us. We must stop seeing the future of our country in terms of black and white. We have accepted reconciliation. Let’s build a nonracial South Africa,” he said.
AfriForum has said that it will fight for the right to retain Afrikaans-only institutions, pointing out that any move towards dual-medium in the past has ultimately led to a school or university becoming exclusively English.
Moves to force universities such as Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria to change their main language of teaching to English have been met with resistance from councils.
Afrikaans is widely used in South Africa, and it is the third most commonly spoken of South Africa’s 11 official languages, after isiZulu and isiXhosa.
Proponents of Afrikaans-only schools and universities argue that it is their constitutional right to be taught in the language of their choice.
However, according to professor Sandra Liebenberg from Stellenbosch University, this reading and interpretation of the Constitution is false, as the Constitution puts equal access at the core of education.
Read: Sorry, but Afrikaans doesn’t deserve any special treatment
“(The Constitution) does not guarantee the unqualified right to mother tongue education. It also doesn’t preclude the existence of single medium institutions. And, importantly, it sets out very specific factors the state must consider in implementing the right. These are equity, practicability and the issue of redress,” Liebenberg said.
“This means that the right to higher education must be equally accessible to all without any form of unfair discrimination. It must be delivered in a way that allows everyone to participate equally.”
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