It is easy to fool yourself that the threat of HIV to teenagers doesn’t need to be addressed in schools with any urgency. There are no visible signs of this ‘silent†epidemic in the classroom. Compare it to the recent meningitis scare at Potchefstroom University: the health authorities sprang into action immediately. A highly contagious and deadly disease was nipped in the bud. The death of a single student had triggered an urgent and effective response.
So why is our response to HIV so ineffectual when it is estimated that one in five teenagers is HIV positive? One obvious reason is that an HIV-positive learner is likely to be perfectly healthy for 10 years or more. So on the surface, educators are interacting with healthy learners without a sniffle or a cough. The old adage, ‘Out of sight, out of mindâ€, becomes a terrifying reality.
But research shows that teenagers themselves are not responding to the threat of HIV. A national school-based HIV/Aids project implemented in the late nineties to empower learners to reduce high-risk sexual behaviour and prevent the spread of HIV/Aids failed dismally. Findings show that learners’ knowledge of Aids increased significantly, but this knowledge did not translate into changed behaviour.
Today every school has access annually to R1 500 from the Department of Education for HIV/Aids initiatives. Courses are run for guidance and Life Orientation include a component on HIV/Aids – but to little effect.
Pierre Leibbrandt, principal of Westridge High in Gauteng, says the same old message about not sleeping around and using condoms has been done to death. He believes there must be some other way of impacting on the child, but he doesn’t know what that is. Tragically, the one way that reaches the young people in Soweto (where two principals reported that learners are eager to find out more about HIV/Aids) is when they witness the devastating effects of the disease themselves. Poverty has resulted in the commonplace trade of sex by schoolgirls for the three C’s – cars, clothes and cell phones – from their ‘sugardaddiesâ€.
According to Leibbrandt the only thing that reaches the learners is internal programmes like the Red Ribbon Group. This group is one of four volunteer groups I set up this year consisting of 15 to 20 senior learners. The volunteers attend a comprehensive training course I designed, and facilitate ‘ready-made†sessions with their peer groups during guidance lessons. In addition they adopt and mentor small groups of junior learners. The culmination of the programme is a quiz on HIV/Aids and a talk show where they simulate the roles of people like Zackie Achmat, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, a priest, a sex-worker, a boy who sleeps around, a learner who abstains, and so on. The learners have to present and organise the latter event on their own and ensure that there is an audience. Some of these events have resulted in support from learners who had been uninvolved and dismissive of the efforts of the volunteers up to that point.
What caused this turnabout? It seemed important to me to recognise the features that typify adolescence. Adolescents are at a stage where they are fighting for personal autonomy and are also becoming increasingly capable of abstract thinking so that imposing ready-made ideas on them and saying, ‘Thou shalt†will not work. It is important that their voices count. I was careful to ensure that the learners looked for their own solutions. They were introduced to thinking skills.
After fortnightly visits to schools from November 2002 to August 2003 I feel that I have only scratched the surface. What is clear to me is that it is unrealistic to expect educators to become experts overnight and perform miracles of change when no one else in the country has succeeded in doing so. Educators do not have a magical quick-fix solution to the problems that beset the youth of today. The society young people live in and the sexual norms they establish for themselves dictate their behaviour. HIV is eminently preventable but changing behaviour patterns and ways of thinking is a daunting task. And the people who are being asked to do it are already fully involved in the task of educating.
Here and there an exceptional teacher does achieve miracles. One of those teachers is Jenny Page. She teaches biology and is currently doing a Masters degree on HIV education. Her interest grew out of a project centred at the University of Pretoria to keep biology teachers up-to-date. Page became interested in HIV and attended courses at Wisconsin University. She has subsequently organised HIV courses for teachers here. Teachers wrote a module for classroom use, which Page refined. The module takes six to eight weeks to teach and includes a scientific experiment comparing the strength of condoms of different makes, and a similar investigation comparing the strength of condoms stored under different conditions.
Apart from learners acquiring the skills of designing a good investigation, there is a further spin-off related to these activities. A shift in perception occurs because, once the students have used the condoms in a scientific investigation it is, something out in the open, subject to the rigours of science.
Written reponses by the learners in the study show they have been positively influenced by the material and are keen to educate others. But sadly, the education officials have put obstacles in the way of this initiative – despite the fact that they promote incorporating HIV awareness throughout the curriculum. Even though a biology subject advisor has attended one of the HIV courses – and rated it highly – she stated that teachers are not allowed to include material that is not part of the curriculum. The module can only be utilised at Grade 11 level where learners have a basic grasp of the scientific knowledge necessary to understand HIV.
My instincts tell me that a curriculum so rigid that it cannot admit new material that is both useful and relevant to the urgent needs of our learners must be re-evaluated. Such creative and inspirational educators are the ones who will succeed in changing learners’ thinking and behaviour when old approaches are failing.