Opinion: Education's date with bad fate: Soweto matric pupil uncovers dark days in classrooms

Written by Jonathan Jansen

There is a nasty story doing the rounds about a dedicated teacher who died and arrived at the pearly gates, to be offered a tour of the various mansions in heaven.

She saw a block of the most beautiful mansions, and the archangel confirmed that the noisy guys in white coats were doctors living there because of their dedicated service to mankind. Around the corner the newly arrived teacher saw an even more impressive block of mansions.

"That's where the social workers live," said the heavenly host, "because of their selfless sacrifice to humanity." The rowdy social workers waved to the incoming teacher through the wide, open windows.

Down the road were the most astounding mansions possible, and this was where the teachers were located.

"They did so much for generations of children," said the angel, "so they get the best accommodation." But the place was very quiet, so the puzzled teacher asked the obvious question: "Okay, but where are the teachers?" The angel responded: "They're in hell, attending a Sadtu meeting." Last week one of my best friends died, a devoted teacher and teacher educator named Carol van der Westhuizen.

She was the last of a breed, a teacher who worked through the night to ensure that her student teachers at the University of Pretoria were placed with the best mentor teachers in our best schools. She was the pioneer who persuaded our student teachers to practise in schools different from the ones in which they were taught.

She satisfied all the criteria for what we call a professional in our craft: that dedicated person with specialist knowledge who sets and even excels the high standards of her profession. She was both teacher and scholar, someone who reflected deeply on her work in order to improve it, and from these reflections published her research in leading journals in the world.

The fact that Carol came from a teacher's college that had closed down did not prevent her from making that difficult transition from college educator to university scholar. She must be in one of those mansions worrying, no doubt, about the hell she left behind in our school system.

Which brings me to the historic conference, held last week in Soweto, to address the now permanent crisis in the schools of township.

The irony would not be lost on those who attended Crisis Committee conferences in the same place in the 1980s to discuss the education chaos in township and country. That was under apartheid. Four governments and five presidents later, and we are still there discussing the same crisis in the same place. Makes you think, doesn't it?

What really moved me, though, was the voice of Sibongile Nthiyane, a beautiful young learner in her final year of high school. With a poise and courage that you seldom see among our youth, her speech to the Soweto audience of parents and teachers included the following scary excerpt:

"They (that is, her teachers) come to school drunk, never dressed properly. They never come on time. They know they are paid to teach us, but we have to beg them to come to classes;

"They send us to buy alcohol during school hours; [and] which they drink during school hours;

"These so-called parents of ours are the ones who tend to date us these days; how can you stand in front of me and teach me, when you know you are dating me?"

If this does not frighten you, nothing will. No wonder parents, and teachers, in Soweto taxi their children to the leafy suburbs of Johannesburg, causing the closure of several schools in this area.

What Sibongile is drawing attention to is a complex and corrupting school culture that has long destroyed professional routines of teaching and learning among the most vulnerable schools in our country. This can't be fixed with opportunistic political speeches in an election year or by occasional fits of moral pique.

What you have in Soweto schools - and elsewhere - is something so deeply rotten that it will require strong and sustained intervention across this large sub-system of South African schools.

This is something so crucial for politicians to understand, for they work in short-term, election-cycle thinking to secure their positions; and it is very important for provincial bureaucrats to grasp, since most work with limited knowledge and insight into the nature of this school- and classroom-level crisis.

(This story was provided and used with permission by Timeslive.)