What happens within classrooms is at the heart of all education. However progressive policy might be, however large the government’s education budget, and however many more young people enjoy their constitutional rights to basic education than was ever the case under apartheid (or colonially), the quality of the classroom experience determines all successes and failures.
And corporal punishment still emerges as a major controversy, despite the far greater post-1994 libertarian and progressive education policies.
The Emerging Voices report’s chapter five provides a mixed picture of ‘experience of the classroom”. Curriculum 2005 was introduced in 1997 to remove the ‘bias, discrimination and social injustice” that underpinned apartheid’s Christian National Education and Bantu Education.
But the new curriculum’s methodology – outcomes-based education (OBE) – draws fire in rural areas. More than half the report’s respondents (58%) were ‘dissatisfied” with OBE. Limpopo teachers were especially unhappy (67%), followed by KwaZulu-Natal (59%) and the Eastern Cape (49%). Teachers supplied many reasons, including:
Inadequate training;
Overcrowded classrooms that make attention to individual learners difficult;
Too much paperwork;
Lack of discipline at schools; and
Lack of teaching and learning resources, which was a major complaint, especially teaching aids, infrastructure and shortage of teachers.
Different groups of respondents provided their perspectives:
Learners
They do not think their teachers have significantly changed their classroom practices, still requiring prayers before teaching begins. And ‘we just keep quiet and respect our lady teacher and do corrections”, one learner’s essay says. ‘She raised questions and we respond to her.”
Learners also said they have difficulty understanding what their teachers are saying – though ‘why this is the case is unclear”.
Visitors to schools
One characteristic school in KwaZulu-Natal has had a great deal of NGO assistance over some years, ‘and so should have shown some improvements over other schools”, the report says. ‘Unfortunately, it did not.”
The visitors to this school found classrooms unattended by teachers, and learners surrounded by learning materials in a language they do not understand, ‘and without possessing even rudimentary arithmetical knowledge”.
Parents and teachers
Some see corporal punishment as normal. ‘But learners experience it as abusing their rights within education.” Parents and learners share one common vision: both see a link between education and development.
‘Possibilities exist for the development of a culture of human rights and democracy
in classrooms,” the chapter concludes, ‘but they require new relationships between teachers and learners.” This will enable classrooms to become ‘more than the white elephants of development”.
Mail & Guardian
Fast Facts
A lack of transport – a learner, Mnqagayi, sums it up: ‘I have to wake up at 4am and only get back home at 4pm. I am normally dead tired and very hungry and there is no time to study.”
Corporal punishment is still used with ‘tacit approval” of parents, who still consider it a legitimate way of disciplining children.
Classes in the rural areas are still larger that the norm of 33:1. In Limpopo, learner: teacher ratio is 39:1, and it is 41:1 in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
Household chores constitute barriers as learners have to perform various home-based tasks such as milking, drawing water and cooking before going to school.
Violence against girls is still rife. One of the girls says: ‘I was scared of bullies who wanted me to tell them answers and if I don’t they threaten to beat me.”
Teenage girls drop out of school due to pregnancy. ‘My parents are not working and don’t have money for school fees. The baby only made my problems worse, but it helped me a bit as I am now getting a child-care grant,” says one of the girl learners.
Parents prefer education that is relevant to rural areas. ‘I think it will be helpful for our children to go back to sewing [uniforms]. There must be health education to help treat diseases like HIV/Aids,” remarks one parent.