Last month’s performance in the streets of Johannesburg has reinforced the fact that Congress of South African Students (Cosas) has neither the organisational skills nor the leadership to direct its membership in a positive direction. Marches take a lot of effort and know-how if they are to be a lawful and successful demonstration of dissatisfaction. Otherwise, the exercise merely serves to confirm the public’s impression that the youth is a bunch of irresponsible criminals-in-the-making who would rather get together to terrorise ordinary citizens than get an education.
There is no doubt that student organisations like Cosas and the Pan African Student Organisation have a ton of work to do if they want to earn the respect of education officials and society generally. This point raises the question of what their elders in the two political bodies to which they are aligned are doing to guide them: why are the African National Congress and Pan African Congress neglecting their young members?
But this is only one side of the issue. For all the pitfalls of this student action, the fact remains that they are reacting to a situation that urgently needs transformation. Some of the issues Cosas raised this time round — like making history compulsory — hardly seem to warrant this kind of action. But other key concerns deserve to be taken very seriously.
The issue of school gates having to be locked in Gauteng during school hours is one. Yes, students should be kept safely in schools, and yes, there is a problem of truancy. But what about keeping registers and using a points system? If learners repeatedly bunk afternoon classes because they couldn’t be bothered to come back to school after lunch, couldn’t they rather face the consequences of a formal punishment?
But at the bottom of it all is the really big issue: the continuing inequalities that persist in our education system and the bald fact that schooling may be compulsory but cannot be described as free. Of course, there are a variety of socio-economic issues that result in a learner having to walk distances barefoot on an empty stomach with only one blunt pencil to write with. But this doesn’t lessen the responsibility of education departments to provide accessible, quality education; it just makes it more difficult.
There is also the argument that learners shouldn’t be taking to the streets when they can negotiate their differences with the authorities through democratic channels. Structures exist all the way from the schools themselves to the head honchos at national level for learners to air their views.
But maybe that is exactly the problem: learners’ views are simply regarded as so much hot air. You can imagine the education officials sitting around the conference table suppressing their yawns and mastering new doodles as they endure the scheduled half-hour for the students to spout their idealist notions.
Perhaps this is an unfair representation; there must be some people in education circles who give weight to the learners’ views. But the problem remains that the students themselves are clearly not convinced they’re being taken seriously. And unless meaningful efforts are made to get the youngsters to buy into democracy, we will doubtlessly be seeing a lot more student action.
To achieve this is going to take more than a few conciliatory meetings — which is why I’m glad to be an observer on the sidelines of the education world. Changes to this newspaper are a great deal simpler to implement. One that I want to note is that this is the last month that three of our columnists — Thandi Chaane, Libby Young and Janine Orderson — will be writing for us. I want to thank them all for the insights and personality they contributed to the Teacher. But keep watching the comment pages — there’ll be fresh voices a-plenty.