COLUMN ONE : A Matter of Black and White : Education remains sadly segregated in South Africa. While 250,000 desks sit empty in white schools, ill-equipped black schools are bulging with up to a million too many students.

On those rare days this year when Soweto’s teachers haven’t been on strike or the pupils boycotting school, Fundi Vabaza has tried to teach business economics to 80 black youngsters squeezed into 30 desks in a classroom without an overhead projector or even a textbook.

Here at Lamula High School, Vabaza says, “You have to bank on their imagination.”

At the whites-only Cape Town High School, where there hasn’t been a strike or a boycott in memory, there are videocassette players, computers, copying machines, laboratories and more than enough textbooks to go around this year.

There just aren’t enough students to fill all the desks.

The result: “We’re no longer able to maintain the school buses, the swimming pool and other facilities purchased when the school was bigger,” says Nugent Field, the principal.

Two typical high schools, one black and one white, supported unequally by the same government, tell the sad story of racially segregated education in South Africa.

And just as the black majority is being called on to join the political process in South Africa, an entire generation of uneducated black youngsters is wandering the township streets without jobs or skills.

“We are sitting on some kind of time bomb,” said Belede Mazwai, a Soweto high school teacher who recently quit in frustration. “Very soon, the kids are going to be taking over this country, and I’m frightened to think what will happen.”

While 200 white schools have closed for lack of pupils in the last decade and 250,000 desks are still vacant, black schools are bulging with a million too many students. While white schools are stocked with all the teaching aids of a modern educational system, black schools lack the basics, from library books to test tubes to wall maps.

While white schools lay off highly trained teachers for lack of students, black schools desperately scratch for more--and better qualified--teachers. About half the teachers in black primary schools, and one-tenth of those in high schools, have no high school diploma.

The government recently said it might open some white schools next year to all races. But its conditions, including a requirement that 90% of the parents in each school approve, doom that plan to failure, educators say. And even if all the white schools were integrated--a move no one expects any time soon--it would only begin to solve the problems.

The report card for South Africa’s educational system comes as no surprise. Last year, 96% of the country’s white high school seniors passed their graduation exams. The pass rate among blacks was 42%. In Soweto, the country’s largest black township, nine out of 10 seniors failed.

Most black parents blame the education crisis on the government, which spends five times more to educate a white child than a black child. But parents also blame the anti-apartheid movement, which until a few weeks ago had spent 14 years trying to change the educational system by disrupting it.

“We used to have a slogan, ‘Liberation before education,’ ” said Thami Rubusana, a student activist who failed his graduation examination last year and is back to try again this year. “But we have begun to see you cannot separate education from liberation. Just because it’s an apartheid education doesn’t mean it’s all rotten.”

Mandela’s Message

Nelson Mandela, deputy president of the African National Congress, has been trying to deliver that message to students since his release from prison Feb. 11.

More schools, more teachers and better facilities are needed, he told a recent political rally. But “the tactic of boycott cannot hope to win our battles,” he added. “Our stayaways and school boycotts are giving the education department one long public holiday.”

Not everyone has listened, however, and frustration with the educational system bubbled over soon after President Frederik W. de Klerk lifted the lid on black protest in February.

In Soweto and Alexandra townships, for example, 6,000 teachers organized by an ANC-aligned union staged a “chalks-down” that had the wide support of student activists. For four weeks, teachers went to school every day but refused to lift a piece of chalk to the blackboard in protest over low wages, heavy schedules and textbook shortages.

“Teachers have been silenced by the government for a very long time,” said Curtis Nkondo, president of the National Education Union of South Africa, which represents the teachers. “Now that they have a chance of expressing themselves, they don’t have the patience.”

Nkondo argues that education will never be politically neutral in South Africa because the government uses it to dominate blacks, and the anti-apartheid movement now is using it to fight domination.

“We have to make use of our weapons,” Nkondo said.

The Soweto teachers strike was suspended Wednesday with a government promise to try to meet their demands for salary increases and for more teachers. But the strike, pupil boycotts and impromptu holidays such as Mandela’s release from prison already had taken a toll. Of 64 school days on the calendar since January, school has been in session for only four.

The government contends that it is beginning to improve black schooling and it has set aside $100 million to build black schools this year. But education experts say South Africa would need to open 300 new schools every year to keep up with the growing black student population and triple its annual school budget to give blacks and whites an equal education.

“There is still a hell of a job to be done,” acknowledged Stoffel van der Merwe, the government official who oversees black education.

Lamula High School, where Vabaza teaches, sits in the middle of Soweto, a township of 2.5 million people and 280 public schools. For years the heart of black activism has beat strongest in this hometown of such famous nationalist leaders as Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu.

It was here that tens of thousands of students took to the streets on June 16, 1976, to protest the government insistence that arithmetic and social studies be taught in Afrikaans, the language of the Dutch-descended white settlers.

The government backed down on Afrikaans, but not before dozens of protesting children were killed by police bullets in roiling South African townships, and the students’ struggle against apartheid education was born.

“All the battles today are being fought by the children, because they say the adults are becoming too cautious,” said Wilkie Khambule, who resigned as principal of Orlando High School in Soweto in 1976 to protest the police action. “The child of yesteryear accepted that the white person had the advantage. But the present child doesn’t see why the white child has an advantage.”

Khambule, now principal of Pace Community College, admires the student activism, but he laments “the tremendous waste of human resources.”

“I tell my students that if they use the present circumstances as excuses not to study, they are going to be sorry,” Khambule said. “If there is any change in the country, they won’t be able to sit at the table because they won’t be prepared.”

But Michael Dube, an 18-year-old Soweto student leader, says he and his fellow students are prepared to “sacrifice our education for the sake of the country. If we don’t push, history won’t forgive us.”

A few weeks ago, the authorities declared Lamula High School’s drab, prefabricated classrooms uninhabitable. Doors had been stolen from their hinges and holes punched through the walls. The 1,400 students were forced into three primary school buildings.

One blackboard in the deserted high school still carries the chalked markings of an algebra problem. The classroom graffiti celebrate both black militancy and black hope. In small, penciled letters on one wall is the saying: “I know I’m somebody cos God makes no junk.”

The conditions for Lamula High’s pupils and teachers did not change much with the move.

Seated Five to a Desk

Vabaza’s class in Xhosa, an African language, has 101 students, seated five to a desk. There are no laboratory facilities, only a handful of textbooks and no books in the library. Assigning homework without books is impossible, she said, and because there is no mimeograph machine, her classes spend hours copying passages of the book from the blackboard.

“The type of education we are giving kids now is useless,” Vabaza said. “It’s just the same as no teaching at all. But you always feel guilty when students fail.”

Of 100 Lamula students who took the high school graduation exam last year, only 12 passed and only four of those scored high enough to qualify for university entrance.

Although students may be failing the course work, many have quickly learned that mass action is a potent way to get what they want in school. Black students today are increasingly dictating when and what they will learn, and principals and teachers who refuse to knuckle under to “people’s education” have been driven out.

“Students are exposed to politics, and if you as a teacher try to turn a blind eye to that, it creates a lot of problems,” said Mary Selebogo, another Soweto teacher.

In that and myriad other ways, white schools bear little resemblance to black schools in South Africa. White schools are run by parents’ boards, and student power never extends beyond the purely advisory role of the student council.

Cape Town High School, a short walk from the offices of Parliament, is not among the richest white schools in the country. Nevertheless, the contrast with most black schools is readily apparent.

The freshly painted white building with its red tile roof and hardwood floors has an intercom system for the principal’s daily announcements, a full library, a home economics classroom with ovens and stoves, science laboratories stocked with glassware, and acres of neatly clipped sports fields. Students dressed in the school’s green and white colors all carry shoulder bags stuffed with books. Dates and sports and even homework, not politics, are the favored topics of hallway conversation.

“Obviously, one never reaches perfection,” said Field, the principal. “But I think the standard of education is very high here, and we have a lot to be happy for.”

Field’s biggest worry is enrollment. Four years ago he had 600 pupils in the school’s five grades. Today that figure is 300. At least four of the nearest white schools face similar problems resulting from emigration, low birthrates and the growing popularity of private schools among whites.

No class at Cape Town High has more than 30 students, and some are as small as four. Ten teachers have left and have not been replaced, the school dropped its rugby team for lack of players and it is phasing out two subjects--Xhosa and business economics.

Fewer students means less money for the parents’ board to spend. Although the government pays for teacher salaries and books, white schools in South Africa raise money from extra student fees and parent-teacher associations to maintain their swimming pools, school buses and sports grounds. At Cape Town High, each student pays about $30 each term.

Opening Cape Town High to all races would help solve the enrollment problem and many parents and students support the idea.

“As long as I get my education, that’s all that matters to me,” said Darryn Havenga, 15. Many parents agree, although they also are concerned “that standards be maintained,” Field said.

Now Private Schools

Several white schools have rescued themselves by becoming private schools, which allows them to open their doors to blacks, Indians and people of mixed race. But in the process the schools lose substantial state subsidies, and the students must pay thousands of dollars in tuition.

The government recently suggested that some white schools could become multiracial beginning next year if 90% of the school’s parents agree. Cape Town High is one of 20 schools that wants to become “open,” but no one knows if it can muster the approval of that many parents.

In 1953, Hendrik Verwoerd, one of the architects of apartheid, first set out the government philosophy behind black education when he created a central government department in charge of “Bantu education,” taking away all the autonomy black schools had enjoyed.

Under that new system, Verwoerd said, “Natives (blacks) will be taught from childhood that equality with Europeans (whites) is not for them.”

Van der Merwe, the current white minister of black education, says the government has abandoned those old policies and is trying to upgrade black education. But he believes that segregated schools still are best for South Africa because of the differing “cultural needs” of blacks and whites.

Besides, he added, with the “huge differential between white and black education, if we immediately integrated everything it would create tremendous chaos.”