They should know. Bantu Education is what they had, before 1976.
But Angie Motshekga, MEC for Education in Gauteng, wants all homeschoolers to be qualified and certified teachers (of which there are fewer in the schools every day), all home education to comply with the discredited national curriculum, and all homelearners to follow programmes registered wih the South African Qualificaions Authority (SAQA). Those are only some of the "guidelines and criteria" the MEC intends to impose on homeschoolers in Gauteng.
The MEC for Education has called for public comment on her proposed guidelines and criteria in a special Provincial Gazette published on 20th August. The Pestalozzi Trust has submitted comments on behalf of its members.
In general, the Trust is quite pleased with the proposals. They will make it very easy for the Trust to defend its members if their home education were challenged in court.
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The reason for this is that the proposals are so blatantly unreasonable and unjustifiable that they are almost certainly unenforceable in court. For example: Decades of research in several countries have failed to find any evidence that children who are educated at home by qualified teachers perform any beter than children receiving home education from parents who have no teacher qualifications (or, for that matter, parents who have not even completed their Matric!)
Since the proposed measures function as preconditions for the registration of home learners, they effectively make the requirement for the registration of homelearners unenforceable as well. However, the effect will be to increase the level of harassment that homeschoolers have to endure.
This is the second government attempt this year to strangle home education. In May, the national education minister attempted to make it impossible for private candidates to write matric. Protests from home schoolers and others persuaded her to reverse that decision, at least for the time being.
The Trust and the Association for Homeschooling have repeatedly and regularly requested the opportunity to discuss home education policies with the Department in Gauteng. After thirteen years they are still waiting for that pleasure.
Accordingly, the Trust has informed the MEC that, if the final version of the guidelines and criteria have an adverse effect on the rights of its member families, the Trust will take the measures on judicial review. That will afford the MEC the opportunity to submit the measures and the reasons for them to the scrutiny of experts in a public and impartial tribunal.
In other words: The policy on home education in Gauteng will probably be forged in the courts and not in the office of the MEC.
However, the Trust repeated its offer to assist in any bona fide process to draft reasonable and justifiable policies on home education. Leendert van Oostrum, executive officer of the Trust, says that it is urgent that South Africans be encouraged to explore all alternative education options to counter the collapse of the government schools.
Having just returned from an international conference on home education, Van Oostrum reports that state school systems world wide find themselves in a state of terminal decay. And governments have no anwers.
"It is inconceivable that we have come to a point where officials who have run a working education system into the ground now want to impose the same structures that have killed education in the public schools on the surviving remnants of good education in the country", he argues: "Our constitution and international instruments of human rights such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child expressly deny them the power to do that. Instead, they have usurped the lawful authority of families and civil society, and we just let them do it!"
"The time has come for civil society to reclaim its rightful role in education. Progresive governments understand this and encourage alternative forms of education for the sake of the children and the future", Van Oostrum says.