AfriForum launches campaign against government's attack on Afrikaans schools
AfriForum has announced that it is today launching a comprehensive campaign to counter government's renewed attacks on Afrikaans as medium of education in schools. The campaign, Red Afrikaanse Skole (Save Afrikaans Schools), comprises a five-point plan that can be supported quite easily.
This follows after all three of the schools in Fochville that still offer Afrikaans-medium education, had been informed by the Gauteng Department of Education that at the start of the 2012 school year, they will be forced to accommodate groups of English-speaking learners.
Two of these schools already are filled to capacity, however the Department blatantly ignores this fact and is not prepared to have the English learners accommodated in only one of these schools either. It is not even prepared to negotiate the matter with the interested parties any longer.
According to Alana Bailey, deputy CEO of AfriForum, it is unacceptable for schools to be forced in this manner to provide English-medium tuition. "Time and again learners who demand English-medium education are forced into Afrikaans-medium schools for political reasons and the schools are then obliged to turn into parallel-medium institutions at their own cost. In the long run, these schools become English-medium institutions, with the result that there are even less schools where Afrikaans-speaking learners have access to the internationally recognised right to enjoy mother-language education in an Afrikaans cultural environment."
AfriForum's opinion that the education authorities specifically target Afrikaanse schools, according to Bailey is proven by the fact that not a single example can be found in South Africa of an English-medium school where the Minister or education authorities get involved to force it to change its language policy or to provide education to learners in any other language apart from English.