Chairperson, we could say that freedom is the autonomous and self-generating ability to do what needs to be done. President Zuma spoke yesterday about what needs to be done. He is to be congratulated for firmly placing service delivery, and especially so for poor people, in our line of vision and sight.
Government can count on our wholehearted support for the service delivery project. We cannot prosper, we all realise, unless we make poverty history. And the question, of course, is how. There is no straightforward answer to this, especially at a time when the growth that confirmed the macroeconomic dogma has come to a recessionist halt. Still, we do know that education matters and it matters enormously. It matters to our changing position in the global economic order as we seek to move from a resource-based export economy to a knowledge-based one.
Education matters to our efforts to modernise our communications, our energy and our science-based health sectors. It matters immensely to the quality of our democracy, for a dynamic one cannot function effectively without having educated citizens who are accustomed to thinking for themselves. Most of all, it matters to our young people, for education remains the most powerful route to moving from the tyranny of survival to the freedom of self-actualisation.
We therefore applaud President Zuma and his government's embrace of education as a priority. But we need to go much further than simply emphasising teacher discipline, important as that may be. At the heart of what needs doing in our country is the professionalisation of the vocation of teaching. We often say that teachers are the most important people because we entrust our children's education to them, and then we proceed very easily to treating them very badly indeed. We should stand firmly behind the good teachers, of whom there are many in this country.
The hon Minister of Higher Education and Training must ensure that teacher training becomes excellent, because it is not. Set aside attractive bursaries; make teaching a worthwhile career; provide incentives for improving their academic education; strengthen the professional associations; shield the teachers from the distraction of self-serving, instrumentalist and reckless trade unions. Please do not put teachers through another round of curriculum reform. Refine, focus and support teaching, and ensure that the basics - reading, writing and arithmetic - are there.
Young people from poor areas struggle to get access to higher education. The educational quality of entry undergraduates is not very good at all. The dropout rate is much too high. There are not enough science, engineering and medical graduates. We are not graduating enough doctorates, in some critical fields, to replace the ageing professorial populations.
Let the institutions of higher learning play to their strengths. Let the community colleges graduate adults with Grade 12 and some employment- related diplomas. Let the undergraduate universities offer a well-rounded four-year bachelors degree. Create professional colleges for teacher, nursing and agricultural science training. Let the postgraduate divisions of the major research universities expand and pull these universities closer to the Department of Science and Technology with their elaborate and sometimes aloof science councils. And, yes, do this in a financially sustainable way. The hon Minister of Higher Education and Training should therefore talk to the hon Minister of Finance before he declares his unwise favour of free undergraduate university education.
President Zuma was silent on science and technology applications when it comes to poverty and development. There are new technologies for waste removal, for sanitation, for water supply and irrigation. There are low- cost energy panels for people living in informal settlements under development. Many of these innovations take into account some critical global warming and climate-change issues.
There is a world of biology that yields new diagnostic and predictive biomedical technologies. There are new ways of using genome-based science to make vaccines for animals and human infectious diseases. Remember that as a country we are not very good at discovery science, but we are very good at adapting discoveries made elsewhere for local use.
Most of all, I would like this government to stop the ambivalence it has when it comes to science and technology, and to start owning what is the largest science and technology infrastructure on the African continent.
I end by introducing you to Ruqshana Parker. She is from Mitchells Plain and she is a student at the University of Cape Town working towards a BA in English. I asked her to come to Parliament today. I want to say that there are thousands of Ruqshanas in Mitchells Plain, Khayelitsha, Langa, Kraaifontein, Soweto, Eldorado Park, Chatsworth, Uitenhage and the many places we, hon members, represent, waiting to have their talent discovered and nurtured. We owe it to them and to our children to use taxpayers' money to give them the best education, using the best science and technology that there is, leading into the future. Thank you very much. [Applause.]