Toxic mix. Graeme Bloch
Who can make a difference?
To do something meaningful about schools, given the deep challenges and extensive underperformance, means that everyone will have to play a role. The ANC at Polokwane was absolutely right to say that education will have to be a broad societal concern, certainly not just a concern of the educationists.
There is a variety of ways to tap the energy, the skills, the experience of citizens in this country. There are things that every single citizen can do, whether it is individuals helping the children of their domestic worker; a community making sure every child in uniform is actually attending school; graduates ploughing back their success by paying someone’s way at their old school; or companies contributing hundreds of thousands of Rand through their corporate social investments. More than money, the important thing is the range of skills that can be mobilised and the enthusiasm and energy directed to give every child a chance. Many things can happen very quickly to improve our failing schools.
There are two groups who are going to have to take most of the burden and the strain, who are most responsible for taking the initiative and showing the way to improvement. These are the professionals who make education work and sustain the learning enterprise. Firstly, of course, the government must do its job. From top to toe, from the minister at national level through to the provinces and the officials in every district, the government must be seen to work. Without excuses and unnecessary delays. Government and its officials are there to smooth the way and make the changes happen. They need to serve in a supportive and constructive way, without needless bureaucracy, paperwork and symbolic compliance for its own sake.
The other group who will really need to come on board are the teachers themselves. There are almost 400000 teachers in our schools. Not every single one can be brilliant, to be sure. There are daily examples of perseverance, of sharing of skills, of long hours and caring support, of teachers who do their jobs with integrity and knowledge. Still, too many teachers get away with not being able to teach; too many engage in antisocial and anti-educational activities, often protected by their unions. Whether teachers are or are not in class, whether they struggle to plan their year and set their agendas, whether they are doing their work well or badly, the public has a right to demand outcomes from teachers. The public needs reassurance that teachers know their trade and their profession and do it well.
Getting teachers right is priority number one if schools are going to work. It will require a mixture of support and laying down the line, an acknowledgment of the complexity of teaching and the many difficulties faced by teachers, alongside a set of demands laying out exactly what is expected of the teachers in our classrooms.
So this book sets out to appeal to all of those citizens who want to make a difference. It calls out for action from citizens who realise that things cannot continue as they are, who understand that they can in fact do something to change it. We all have to act to get things moving, to take responsibility for the challenges our country faces.
This does not mean springing to action without thought, just doing anything and everything that comes to mind all at the same time. It is impossible to fix everything all at once. This book will help to ask what the key drivers are that will have to be chosen. If together citizens really are to make an impact, they will have to find the space and the time to decide and agree on those things that will need to be the points of focus.
The starting point has to be an acknowledgment of what has gone wrong. As anti-apartheid activist, academic and one-time managing director of the World Bank Mamphela Ramphele argues in her book Laying Ghosts to Rest,4 we have to face down the demons and ghosts of the past. Not just what has gone wrong, but what the reasons are, where the causes of the roadblocks and the obstacles are.
This is not a blame game but a determination to identify points of intervention, to understand weaknesses and to decide what has to be fixed to bring the maximum gains. It requires an honest and firm gaze on the shortcomings and a willingness to name the problem.
This book is not a manual. It is not going to help you get your child into a better school. It will not tell you how to deal with discipline problems, or what to do about a headmaster who is not doing his job. It is not going to tell you how to fix a particular problem at the school where your daughter goes, or how to handle a problematic district official. It is not a ‘how to’ book in that sense of the word. Rather, it helps you to know that these kinds of problems occur right through the system of schooling in South Africa and to understand their impact and implications. Perhaps there is comfort in knowing you are not alone in your worries and concerns. It helps to understand the range of factors that may probably also be contributing to the specific problems that concern you and your child.
This book is written for South Africans who may well have children at school, and therefore certainly have a range of concerns about education. Because of their immediate issues, their minds may have become sharpened to the facts and the challenges. It is human, necessary, legitimate to do the best by your own children, to make sure that they get the most out of their years in the schooling and education system.
Where it all begins
This book is mostly about the school system. As will become clear, schools are not the only places where education happens, where values are passed on and a respect for excellence and achievement is developed. The education system as a whole forms a set of interlocked and interlinking institutions, even ‘pipelines’: this book could not deal with all the issues and fields of education without getting immensely complicated.
So, here I will concentrate mostly on schooling, more particularly on the primary and secondary schools. There will be some focus on the Further Education and Training (FET) vocational option in the last years of high school. I will obviously look at higher education, particularly whether schools are providing the well-prepared and knowledgeable young students that should be entering the universities, and whether these students are meeting with success. The implications of the school system and its linkages and flows at a number of levels are matters that cannot be sidestepped. We also cannot ignore how failures have a knock-on effect right through the educational pipeline. The entire pipeline and its flows and leakages will have to be addressed.
But this book focuses primarily on a specific band of education and does not touch on other important questions and needs in education, such as adult literacy and ‘special needs’ education. This is not simply a pragmatic choice. The school system is the solid base on which many other things rest. It is the place where most children find themselves at some stage or another. If we cannot get the schools right, it is unlikely there will be proper fixes in many of the other areas. There is enough going wrong in the schools, enough evidence to get our teeth into, enough dysfunctionality in the school system alone, to get our stomachs churning and our emotions twisted.
For all these reasons, it makes sense to focus mostly on schools, in fact on the public schooling system to be more specific, where more than 96% of children find themselves. With some focus of this kind, we can more carefully explore what the problems are and how we can develop solutions. Are there things we can do, together, to get our schools into shape? We must acknowledge that it is only the starting point of a long and extended journey on the road to a learning nation, but it is an absolutely necessary starting point.
How should we fix our schools? What will make a difference and open access to quality education for all our children? We would surely like the system to work for everyone at the same time as we struggle to build a decent educational path for our own children and in our own homes and schools. This book appeals to this sense of human solidarity and shared concern.
Education is important to the country. This is because schooling does touch on the skills outputs of the nation, whether South Africa will be at the cutting edge and able to compete with nations throughout the globe. Will we have the urge to innovate, the management systems, the ability and capabilities to implement policy plans, to decide what is essential to growing our economy and to ensuring development in South African society?
If we fixed our schools, education could contribute far more to build a shared citizenship, a respect for diversity, a tolerance for each other and for a range of views and customs. All of these are good reasons to worry