A weekly(ish) update of the articles that I found interesting and therefore think you should read.
South Africa
In a follow-up article to her last piece on South Africa’s failing education system (which appeared in last week’s In the News post), Celia Dugger discusses the rise of a new youth movement aimed at improving the country’s predominantly black and under achieving schools.
Dugger also raises, but largely skips over another very interesting and in many ways troubling fact about primary education here in South Africa. While speaking about a small number of white students who came to show support for the march towards equal education, Dugger writes:
“And Nina Hoffman was among the dozens of white students who joined the march from one of the country’s formerly all-white suburban high schools — Westerford — which can afford a well-stocked library because parents pay annual fees of more than $2,200 per child.”
Important in this observation are the implications of South Africa’s system of required tuition for primary education, even in public schools. An issue not addressed here by Dugger is the fact that despite the forced opening of schools that had served only white students during apartheid to everyone, the requirement of tuition and the ability for individual schools to decide what price to charge has contributed to the presistance of both a degree of segregation and a substantial achievement gap between South Africa’s historically black and white schools.
As alluded to above, in order to maintaining their high standards, South Africa’s historically successful schools have continued to require tuition fees which as a result largely preclude the vast majority of non-wealthy (i.e. non-white) South African’s from enrolling. While this is not to mean that tuition fees at South Africa’s historically white schools are intended to ensure that they remain predominantly white, what it has meant is that only a select minority of non-white South Africans who have the necessary resources available to pay the relatively high tuition fees have integrated into these schools.
Likewise, the rest of South Africa’s poor population is left with few options regarding education; options that are mainly limited to either spending what money is available to send their children to underperforming, underequiped, and under understaffed township schools, or not sending their children to school at all. All of this has created a situation in which schools that serve poor populations such as those in South Africa’s townships, informal settlements, and rural areas, are unable to provide adequate facilities due to their inability to charge sufficient tuition to cover things like books and maintenance while those institutions that are able to provide a quality education have stayed largely segregated and out of the reach of most.
All of this then begs the question whether South Africa’s system of tuition for primary education is not in itself inherently broken. The answer to which seemingly has the potential to largely determine whether this, or any other movements like it aimed at improving the conditions of schools that serve South Africa’s townships, rural communities, and other poor populations has any real chance of making a significant or lasting impact.
HIV
The New York Times reports on the first true glimpse of hope in the search for an HIV/AIDS vaccine.
“For more than 20 years now, vaccine trials have essentially been failures…” “Now it’s like we were groping down an unlit path, and a door has been opened. We can start asking some very important questions.”
A good start, but it sounds like there is still a long way to go.
“How different are dogfighting and football?”
“There is nothing else to be done, not so long as fans stand and cheer. We are in love with football players, with their courage and grit, and nothing else—neither considerations of science nor those of morality—can compete with the destructive power of that love.”
