Reams have been written about the atrocious state of textbook delivery to schools in Limpopo Province. Here's the latest: basic education minister Angie Motsheka whines that it isn't her fault, and president Jacob Zuma piles another investigation on top of the previous lot.
The impact on school-going children can only be described as a disgrace.
Ivo Vegter, contributor, ITWeb
Textbooks dumped in rivers. Corrupt suppliers. Missed deadlines. Children without learning materials for half a year. The scandal can hardly get more absurd.
The levels of corruption and incompetence test credulity, and the impact on school-going children can only be described as a disgrace. On top of all the other reasons why South Africa's education system is failing the pupils, now they can't even get textbooks to try to get there on their own.
Limpopo bore the brunt of the media coverage, but the problem of compiling, printing and distributing textbooks is not unique. It is a minefield of high costs, complicated logistics, and opportunities for graft. This scandal is merely an illustration of how badly it can all go wrong.
There's a simple solution to the problem. Just give every child an e-reader. Register it to their name, so they have a reason to be responsible with it, just as they are expected to be with their physical textbooks. This can be achieved for under R1 000 per child, and annual costs will go down if devices can be made to last a few years.
What it costs to educate a child seems hard to pin down. A recent City Press study found it to be R12 500 per child per year. Dividing the Department of Basic Education's budget appropriation by the number of learners, however, yields a meagre R1 340. Of that amount, only R120 is spent on curriculum development, which includes producing and delivering textbooks.
Perhaps it's no surprise if South Africa's learners don't have textbooks.
US surveys suggest moving books to electronic form can save about R4 000 per year per child. Whatever the quantum in South Africa, it would be a saving compared to what paper textbook delivery ought to cost.
Obtaining SIM cards that are programmed to access only textbook distribution servers via the networks' 3G services can't be expensive, and can probably be had for free if you talk nicely to the operators. Books themselves (and textbooks are notoriously expensive) will cost far less, even if publishers and authors continue to expect the same payment. There is a reason why an author's royalty on e-books is 70%, compared to about 15% on a printed book. E-book prices are much lower, but they're also virtually cost-free to duplicate and distribute.
Electronic course material means textbooks will be more up to date. It means not lugging an oversized, overweight bag around, causing permanent health trouble. E-readers (unlike laptops and tablet computers) tend to be economical with power use, so battery life is not a problem, provided that children can be given access to charging stations at school. They're also much simpler to use than full-scale laptops, meaning there's much less of an adoption hurdle for both teachers and students, many of whom can send a text message, but aren't comfortable with computers.
If the e-reader is even a little bit sophisticated, it could easily be adapted to offer services such as those provided by Obami, a social network custom-designed in South Africa for use as a school learning platform and safe means of communication among students, teachers and parents. While you're at it, throw in free access (ie, free data connectivity) to .edu and .ac.za domains, as well as to Wikipedia. It might not be the last word on academic truth, but it's a lot more than most kids can access today. Adding a list of other educational sites, such as the astonishingly rich Wolfram Mathworld, would also not go amiss.
Although a walled garden seems inevitable, for reasons of cost, administration and child protection, the sky is the limit for what can be done once kids have access to digital learning materials and electronic communication.
If Motsheka wants to rehabilitate her tarnished image, she could do worse than design a programme for e-learning, to be piloted in 2013 and rolled out in 2014.
But, as I pointed out in a recent column in the 'Daily Maverick', entitled: “How do we fix our dismal education?” it seems entirely daft to depend on the government's competence when the future of our country's children is at stake. When the education department announced it would centralise textbook delivery, the publishing industry did warn of failure, and there is no reason not to adopt a cynical view of anything that benighted department promises. Thanks to bureaucratic incompetence and an ideological devotion to a discredited model, known as “outcomes-based education”, South Africa already has a new “lost generation” of under-educated youth to add to the disastrous legacy of Bantu Education.
Here's a perfect opportunity for the private sector to make a massive difference to South Africa's future, invest in people they can actually employ one day, and make some money to boot.
There are 26 000 schools in South Africa, failing to educate 12.2 million children. It's a big job, so innovative companies that feel they're up to the challenge had better get cracking.
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