Martin Prew suggests that many South African schools are undiagnosed post-conflict schools (Mail & Guardian, June 4).
While this may be true for many schools, I’m not sure that the explanation helps us to understand the situation any more clearly than the diagnosis in the early 1990s of a ‘breakdown of a culture of learning and teaching” in many schools.
Prew is correct that these schools needed support and nurturing but were hit instead with a barrage of new policies that exacerbated their vulnerability.
However, ‘post conflict” seems to suggest that now our society is normalised, where in fact we experience high levels of poverty, trauma, Aids and crime, which is hardly normal.
But I think we need to engage with the question that sociologist Basil Bernstein asked 40 years ago: ‘Can education compensate for society?”
The reality in South Africa is that many children, about six out of 10, live in poverty. They come to school hungry and have little emotional nurturing at home, let alone home support for cognitive development since many households do not have resources such as books.
Because of the material poverty and emotional trauma of children, teachers spend a lot of time caring. This means that in many South African schools the caring work of teachers takes on greater importance than the cognitive work.
Also many primary school teachers say that the reason they became teachers was ‘to care for the children” — in other words, they define their identities as teachers in terms of nurturing rather than supporting cognitive development.
Many such teachers are unlikely themselves to have been exposed to a model of schooling where both emotional and cognitive development were supported. This perspective may give us another way of understanding the failure of schooling in South Africa.
If there were counsellors, psychologists and social workers in schools, this would still not ‘compensate for society” but could provide support for teachers and learners and would give teachers more time to focus on the work of being a teacher, which, as the late Wally Morrow said, is ‘to organise systematic learning”.
This systematic learning can happen only when teachers have the knowledge of how children develop literacy and numeracy skills and have a deep knowledge of the discipline they are teaching.
Systematic learning is better when young children develop strong literacy competence and thinking skills in their mother tongue.
How to support teachers so that meaningful systematic learning can happen in all classrooms is a complex challenge, but strengthening the psycho-social support services in schools is one place to start.
Dr Carol Bertram is a senior lecturer in the education faculty at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg