SOUTH AFRICA, July 24, 2003: The National council for Eastern Languages claimed a major victory when national education minister Kader Asmal overturned his decision to remove Eastern languages from the school syllabus. The council, officials of the South African qualifications authority, South African Hindu Maha Sabha and the SA Tamil Federation met Asmal in Pretoria this week to discuss the fate of Eastern languages amid rising fears that the national education department was considering scrapping some of these languages from the country’s school syllabus because of their inability to attract sufficient numbers of pupils. The minister agreed to retain Tamil, Urdu, Hindi, Telegu and Arabic in the Further Education and Training phase up to Grade 9. “We are very pleased with the outcome and this serves to confirm that the minister understands the potential of these languages,” said council chairman Ram Maharaj.
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