Free Education Campaign

Free Education Campaign




The doors of learning and culture shall be opened



Progress made on the Free Education Campaign will be availed timeously. Below is the base document for the National Day of Action.



Free Education Campaign 2007.



Towards free and quality education in South Africa – a contextual document



Introduction



The South African Students’ Congress is concerned with the scourge of students’ exclusion and protest in schools and universities due to lack of finances. We further believe that the problems in these institutions are also evident within the Further Education Institutions, and calls for an immediate address by the Minister of Education.



The violence of Financial Exclusion in education.



We are concerned that South African education has reached to a point where access is determined by financial capacity, and the ability to pay. The recent demonstrations in Wits, UNW, TUT and Eastern Cape Technikon are as a result of students’ frustrations facing exclusion from institutions of learning. The cost of education since the privatisation of services in higher education institutions has increased. Students have to pay more for catering, transport and accommodation, which increased the burden on the high tuition fees. Some of the institutions increase fees, which excludes black, working class and poor students from learning. We do not understand, and we should be made to understand, why a Law Degree in Wits is more expensive than that in the University of Limpopo. This is as a result of the absence of a national fees regulation



In schools, despite the legal provision that learners whose parents are unable to pay school fees are not forced to pay, many principals, confronted with the basic need to run the administration of the schools, force parents to pay or excludes learners. Many learners, even after admission, go on without food and transport in their schools, a condition that impacts on their ability to pass. Parents are also faced with long processes of proving that they are unable to pay, which actually costs them more than the school fees themselves.



In FET institutions, if you cannot pay you should not even bother to come near the gates of these institutions. There is no provision for student funding and the cost of education here is increasing annually more than the Consumer Price Index.



We believe that South Africa should invest in its learning institutions with a view of creating a huge skills and human resource base. Which will further grow the economy.