Teachers sometimes feel powerless to guide their pupils through morally intricate situations such as the 2008 xenophobic attacks.
How to advise pupils on ethical behaviour was the major point of discussion when about 50 Gauteng school principals and other leaders in public and private education met on Thursday evening last week at an education transformation forum convened by the Gordon Institute of Business Science in Johannesburg.
The evening started with a showing of Molly Blank’s documentary movie Where Do I Stand?, which examines the “ethical choices” that secondary school pupils had to make during the 2008’s xenophobic violence.
There’s sometimes a “sense of inadequacy” among teachers about whether they are “teaching the right things”, said Mary Williams, executive headmistress of Roedean School in Parktown, Johannesburg.
“Sometimes we don’t say the right things at the right time,” said Williams. “I just don’t know if we are doing enough to teach them that their world will be different from ours.”
Teachers have let down the “absolutely bewildered” pupils, said Craine Soudien, deputy vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town. They have failed to “cultivate” their learners’ thoughts to deal with the complex South Africa.
“We’ve let them down in many ways,” he said. “What’s our response, as teachers, to this cry that young people are making to us?”
Gasen Naicker, principal of Carter Primary School in Alexander, said teachers are struggling to deal with “bewildered” pupils and need training to do so adequately.
“Since the 1980s, we’ve not begun the process of reteaching the teacher how to deal with a bewildered learner,” he said.
University of the Free State vice-chancellor Jonathan Jansen suggested teachers could assist their pupils to make “moral choices” by providing them with an “alternative storyline to what’s happening”.
“The storyline to xenophobia was scary,” Jansen said.
“Where was the storyline that says they accommodated us during apartheid?”
Jansen deplored the word “influx”. It was “not the word” to use when talking about African immigrants who come to South Africa, he said.
“We really have to provide the learners with a language with which to speak about the present and the past,” Jansen said.
Alternative storylines would help youngsters make their voices heard in a “complex” world in which “pupils face dilemmas about how to act”, Jansen said.
When the schooling system fails to instil moral values in pupils, they will learn from other sources, Jansen said. “If you don’t fill the [social] knowledge gap somebody else will.”
For Dian Cockroft, principal at St Frances in the East Rand, it’s about giving an opportunity to the seemingly confused pupils to prove themselves. They surprise many when they “turn out to be the best prefects because they’ve been given a chance”, she said.
“There’s nothing wrong with standing up for what you believe. That’s what we teach,” Cockroft told the Mail & Guardian. “But the ultimate is whether a child takes it or not.”