An evaluation exercise on development economics

A useful exercise here to force students into writing an evaluation point in an essay on the limits to a country’s growth and development, something I find too many simply ‘forget’ to do when answering essay questions…

After reading through this article from the Economist about the many problems in South Africa’s education system, I plan to spend a few minutes having a class discussion on this question:

‘South Africa’s Education Inequality can only be solved by massive public investment in schools and teachers in rural black townships’. Discuss.

Then, each student will be given a copy of the following example ‘explanation’ paragraphs and they’ll have to write an evaluation paragraph that specifically goes with that point and relates to the essay question. Hopefully, this will help those students who still struggle to ensure they’re putting evaluation into their answers.

Explanation paragraphs:

1.)
This statement is quite right. Throughout the apartheid regime, the government deliberately avoided investing in the education of its black citizens. As the article states, less than one in twenty black students manage to complete a degree and around half of blacks pass the ‘matric’ exams, compared with 99% of the white population. The best schools are still to be found on areas dominated by whites, and these schools are the ones with the best facilities. This is despite schooling in South Africa being desegregated in 1994. The government is investing heavily in education, but it needs to ensure that this money is better targeted at supporting those who are currently under-privileged by the present system. It will take serious investment over many years focused specifically on those schools that suffered so much under apartheid to redress this balance.

2.)
Investment will also not only be required in improving the basic infrastructure of the school building and facilities- the teaching of students in poorer black neighbourhoods in South Africa also needs serious investment. Under apartheid the best teachers inevitably worked in the better schools and investment in teacher training and research inevitably focused on those schools. This leaves the schools which the government previously deliberately ignored with a serious lack of skilled teachers capable of delivering the required curriculum, and only with significant investment in improving their wages and providing them with specialized training programmes can their students benefit from an improved education.