Education MEC Fundile Gade has called for the revival of Wednesday sports and choral music at schools to help shield young people from the lure of drugs.
He has also committed to building schools with sports fields to enable pupils to explore their talents, saying not everyone was built for academic success.
“We must bring back school sports. The absence of sport in education results in the drug problem [among pupils].
“The recent success of the province in music means you have great talent in the Eastern Cape. Do not bury it,” Gade said.
“Music contributed to making children disciplined. We are handing over a school but if you were to ask me where are the playing fields, how do I answer that?
“On one hand, the issues of sports fields is given to the department of sports.
“The problem is that you squeeze these pupils into an academic-orientated schooling system as if all of them will excel academically.”
He said a school needed to be diverse — if a pupil excelled in music or at dancing, a career path needed to be created for that child.
Gade was speaking at the official handover of Phathilizwe Primary School in rural Willowvale in the Mbhashe local municipality on Thursday. He was joined by Mbhashe mayor Samkelo Janda.
The MEC said the government needed to reprioritise sports development in schools.
“If SA wants to conquer the world, we need to be serious about this thing called rural development.
“I am not [just] talking about rugby.
“That will never happen until you bring schools sport and develop sport within rural communities.”
He said though the department continued to build state-of-the-art, multimillion-rand schools across the Eastern Cape, in reality its “core business” was building human beings.
“We are just handing over empty walls. These are just walls.
“A school is what happens inside these walls that make a parent interested in sending their child to those walls.
“It will not be a school simply because it has a lot of classrooms.”
He said it was important to figure out what challenges pupils would encounter inside “those walls” and what solutions could be crafted to overcome them.
It was also necessary to consider the problems pupils brought to school from home and ensure that these did not become an additional burden on the school.
He said the Eastern Cape, in particular, was battling with varying school sizes and types, which led to the decision to rationalise or merge some schools and realign others.
But rationalisation, alignment and the merging of schools was not a simple matter and needed proper planning and a “lot of patience”.
In 2012, Eastern Cape education authorities announced a rationalisation and realignment programme to try to streamline the education system after announcing that almost 300 schools in the province had become white elephants because parents had withdrawn their children.
In terms of the programme, some of the affected schools, especially those with low enrolment numbers, would be closed or merged with other schools.
“Hence I say let us find a way of planning this. Let us not make the mistake of shutting our schools and yet our systems are not ready,” Gade said.
Another issue was that some functions such as scholar transport were run by another department and “when that MEC says there is no money to transport those pupils, what are you going to do exactly?”
The province’s education woes were also being compounded by a lack of financial and economic investment in rural areas.
As a result, some parents opted to take their children out of the rural schools and find better-resourced ones in urban areas.
DispatchLIVE
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