Yeah, closing them down isn’t such a good idea. You know that most universities which merged basically closed down their “satellite” campuses in black areas? This simply serves to keep away affordable education from black people.
> The merging of teacher training colleges into universities may be more problematic, but overall, in South Africa, the less institutions, the less chance for waste and looting.
Most teacher colleges weren’t merged, they were simply closed down. Note that waste and looting wasn’t such a big problem before, why is it now?
By the way, you know what is one reason why they were closed down? Provincial governments became extremely corrupt (the funding for colleges came from provincial governments). They simply closed it down to ensure more money for looting.
> I also have to wonder how good the teachers produced by those colleges really were.
Look, they were not the best teachers in the world. But the problem is that we do not need the best teachers in the world, we need a lot of teachers. A good teacher in a class of 40 doesn’t help a thing. Also, the idea of removing teacher diplomas ensures that there are even less teachers (teacher training courses at universities is now 1 year longer).
South Africa loses some 12, 000 teachers a year (6, 000 produced by universities but 18,000 lost due to retirement and immigration). It is a disaster waiting to happen.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=13&...
> Hendrik Verwoerd's comments about Bantu education clearly indicate,
Hendrik Verwoerd was not the be all and end all of the NP government. You know that many of the policies changed after him? In any case, I do not care what someone has said (or what the motives were) but what happens on the ground.
> Migration and the migrant labour system are two very different things. The Apartheid ideal was black men in hostels, black women and children in Bantustans.
Can you give a citation for that? During Apartheid, there were a lot more industries closer to the living area of black people. The industrial zones (of which there were numerous) are an example of that.
Today the economic activity near large centres of black population is a lot lower. The economic outlook in rural areas also forces people to become migrant labourers.
> that it has been abandoned, but one has to question the sustainability of those developments.
Whatever the motive, those developments worked.
> If they had provided job opportunities close to major economic centres, those jobs might have proved to be sustainable.
There are many reasons why those businesses moved (from high crime to non-functioning municipalities). The fact of the matter is that work and businesses are now far from where many employees work. So they have to rely on non-existent transport (such as taxis or horrible metro lines) each day to commute 30km+.