From: shaze@cs.ubc.ca (Scott Hazelhurst)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african
Subject: Re: Absence of black undergrads
Date: 13 Nov 1992 15:18:53 -0800
Organization: Computer Science, University of B.C., Vancouver, B.C., Canada
NNTP-Posting-Host: pacific.cs.ubc.ca

laing@gn.ecn.purdue.edu (Peter Laing) writes:
>  When I read your writings regarding the special programs to help the
>  black students who were struggling as a result of their inferior 
>  schooling, I thought, surely the most important place to spend
>  money is on improving black schooling? By improving the quality
>  of the black schooling (although there shouldn't be a difference
>  between white and black schooling now ????), the need for all these
>  special programs would dissappear. Obviously, this would be a long
>  term solution and thus the special programs are essential for now.

Difference between white and black schooling. As far as I know,
the amount of money spent per capita on black and white students
has been converging.... But extra money doesn't mean better
quality education. The Department of Education and Training
(DET) is incompetent and corrupt and a lot of money has gone into
back pockets of officials. The whole DET system is to put it
in its best perspective fragile. Fingers can be pointed in ALL
directions for this situation, but the system has been doomed
to failure from the start (if you start off life designing to
system to provide inferior education, the system is hardly
likely to produce the goods).

>  But I really feel that worrying about how to go about implementing 
>  computer aided instruction in schools is barking up the wrong tree.

I agree with this. The problem is that it is a very in-thing to 
do. And good PR. That's not to say that CAI is not good, just that
it is expensive. I still think that there is a need to provide
some basic computer literacy in schools, but that can perhaps
be done in centralised facilities.


>  Rather put all those retrenched school teachers to work, teaching
>  black children in the classrooms of all those white schools that 
>  are vacant due to  diminishing numbers of white school children.
>  I think that would produce significantly better results in a much
>  shorter time period. This is obviously easier said than done, but
>  that is where the time, money and effort should be going.


The difficulty that universities have is what to do for the next
ten years. There is a line of argument which goes is to basically
close them down and put the money that's spent on them into
primary and secondary education. While the argument has some merit,
resurrecting universities is not going to be easy or cheap to
do. The short-term benefits of drastically reducing spending on
universities now will cost the country in the future.

Much of the problem is beyond the universityies' capability to
solve. The schooling problem needs (among other thing)  a
government with some foresight and political will (neither of
which the NP is likely to have). Rational rationalisation of
the tertiary sector also requires some political will.


-- 
---shaze@cs.ubc.ca----------------------------------------------------------
   Scott Hazelhurst    
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african