Programme Director
Deputy Minister of Basic Education, Enver Surty
Principal and staff of Memezelo Secondary School, Prince Maluleke
CEO of Alexander Forbes, Mr Edward Kieswetter
Mayor of Tshwane Metropolitan Kgosientso Ramokgopha
Members of the Provincial Legislature
Business partners from various companies
School Governing Body and parents
Learners
Ladies and gentlemen:
I am honoured to join parents, teachers and learners on this special occasion to mark the adoption of Memezelo Secondary School by Alexander Forbes.
I wish to thank Alexander Forbes for making this important contribution towards education. The greatest gift that anyone can give a nation is to educate its children.
When you educate people we kit them out with the intellectual and cognitive tools and means not only to understand their world, their social experience, but also, to change it.
I am confident that this commitment will go a long way towards improving the quality of education in this school and that through this partnership we will turn it into one of the highest performing schools.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Our government has set quality education as the number one priority and we have said that; in order to achieve this objective we need concerted effort from all in our society.
We appeal to communities, labour unions, civil society and business to help strengthen our hand by collectively participating in the development of building a quality education system for all.
As part of this initiative to get all involved in education, together the Minister of Basic Education, Mrs. Angie Motshekga, we met with about 150 business leaders in November last year.
At that meeting business leaders made pledges of supporting education through various interventions, ranging from infrastructure, curriculum support, teacher development, school sport, nutrition, to name but a few areas.
Follow-up interactions from this meeting have resulted in many positive contributions from the business sector including ongoing work on Public-Private Partnerships and the Business Adopt a School Initiative.
This project that we help launch on behalf of Alexander Forbes is one of the first in many that I hope will continue to follow from the private sector.
We welcome their commitment to adopting Memezelo Secondary School as a pilot project that will be rolled-out to other schools in the Soshanguve area later.
This project will focus on training programmes as well as making bursaries available to committed and well performing learners.
We encourage others from the business sector to heed this example set by Alexander Forbes as part of their Corporate Social Investment (CSI) programmes.
Programmes such as these are not only about being seen to be a good corporate citizen, or for tax incentives, but lie at the heart of building the skills base for economic growth and our developmental goals.
We are acutely aware that the delivery of quality education is primarily government's responsibility, but it is one we cannot carry alone and therefore continue to call on others to get involved by adopting education as part of theirs and everybody's business.
For our part we are committed to ensuring that these private sector interventions are well coordinated and used as efficiently as possible.
Programme director;
Let me conclude by challenging the Learners and Teachers of Memezelo Secondary through relaying a story about one of the first laws in moral and ethical philosophy.
The story comes from Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, in which Socrates asks Euthyphro:
"Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"
This question which is now famously known as the "Euthyphro Dilemma" has for centuries been a subject for debate between leading scholars, philosophers and academics of equal fold.
Of course, judging by the intellectual capital sitting before me, I am sure that you have been wondering and asking yourselves why so-called intellectuals would invest so much time trying to answer a question as simple as whether it is the chicken or the egg that came first?
The morale of this story is that; education too has its own ethical "chicken or egg" dilemma in that:
"Ignorance is not a sin; so long as someone is willing to learn, someone ought to be willing to teach".
In other words, it is only if teachers are willing to be at school, in class, on time, motivated and teaching for at least seven hours a day that learners can also be at school, in class, on time, respectful to teachers and learning.
The challenge of this dilemma, therefore, is that this principle applies vice-versa and equally to both you as teachers and learners.
It is up to each of you as teachers to ensure that our children are educated and up the learners to grab this opportunity to learn.
I would once again like to thank Alexander Forbes, parents, teachers, learners and the community of Soshanguve for supporting this programme.
I thank you.
Source: The Presidency
