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For once, rage was non-racial; Jonathan Jansen - An Educated Guess

THOUGH the location sounded straight out of England — The Guild Theatre, Oxford Street, East London — I found myself last Tuesday involved in one of the most exciting education debates this country has ever had.

On a cold winter’s night in a sleepy town known more for its retired pensioners than its intellectual life, more than 400 people packed into this ramshackle theatre to listen, question, propose, disagree, plead and admonish those responsible for the disastrous state of education in the Eastern Cape. They came from everywhere, black and white, students, teachers, pensioners (of course) — and politicians, unionists and academics, non-governmental organisation activists and retired school principals — all to debate passionately the need to restore the human dignity of our children through a decent education. People travelled from as far as Port Elizabeth and Alice to make their presence felt. The highly innovative project of Dawn Barkhuizen, an editor at the Daily Dispatch, the Dispatch Dialogues is a forum to bring leading voices in the country to discuss pressing public concerns, from the crisis in government hospitals to the state of the Presidency. The word that night from the “people on the ground” was truly depressing. Fourteen years into democracy and heart-wrenching tales are still being told about schools without toilets, 160 grade-one children in a classroom, students killed on major roads because of the lack of school transportation, children routinely leaving school in the mornings, absentee teachers, the late delivery of textbooks and on and on and on. I was in the heart of South Africa’s most corrupt province, where more than half of the children fail the final school examination every single year. Then it dawned on me why a crisis existed at all. A man dressed in colourful clothes, representing a senior official in the provincial department of education, took the stage. I had seldom met a government official who was more unimpressive, inarticulate, defensive, evasive and clearly incapable of leading this desperate province out of its misery. He was so pathetic a speaker he did not even realise that the assembled crowd was laughing at him — rather than at his ill-suited joke: “There is no crisis in education.” Once again, I pondered the puzzling question: if the Eastern Cape is the political heartland of the ANC, why has the leadership so consistently failed to make dramatic interventions in this province? People present in the hall were clearly fed-up and the anger, for once, was non-racial. Somebody suggested, correctly, that our focus should be on the foundation of learning — the primary grades — not on that national obsession, the matriculation examination. Another person raised concern about teachers’ salaries and the right to strike. Someone else queried whether I really believed that there was a connection between the corrupt behaviour of politicians and moral decay among the youth. An old man, who had devoted his life to the cause, spoke up courageously for deaf children. School inspectors must come back, insisted another. What struck me that night in East London was not the disagreement but the passion; not the policies of government but the power of people; not the posturing of unions but the communion of citizens. Here in this Town Hall-type public meeting was a large audience of South Africans who were slowly taking back that precious space called public education. It was, as a movement stalwart reminded me, not government education but public education — according to some of the founding documents of our democracy. It was a wonderful contrast to the recent assault on public reason by those promising to kill for politicians and wreck the country if the courts did not sway to the naked populism of the flotsam of society. I left East London lifted by the spirit of the people who, even in the face of the education disaster, still believe that we could turn the school system around. They recognise that government has a role to play, but they also know that such a role is unlikely to be fulfilled by changing personalities such as premiers and education ministers. No, this is a group that recognises that the power to change the schools lies in their hands, not only in Bisho’s. Inspired, I drove to the airport with a novel thought: perhaps it is not a bad place to retire, after all. From The Times, 14 August 2008

Written By: info@read.org.za
Date Posted: 8/18/2008
Number of Views: 469

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