In February, the Minister of Education, Kader Asmal, convened a national conference on Values, Education and Democracy in the 21st Century. The aim of the indaba was to focus on the ways in which education shapes the soul of our society.
The education system is more than a way of training our children for their role in the economy – important as that may be. It is also a means by which we transmit our history, our morality and our dreams. South Africa’s legacy of racism, violence and deprivation makes this task all the more important.
A report on Values, Democracy and Education preceded the conference. A summary of this report was carried in The Teacher in September. The report identified a number of values as important for education in South Africa, including equity, tolerance, multilingualism, openness, accountability and honour.
Embedded in these values is the assumption that we need to tackle the legacy of racism in our schools and in our society. And it is not only ex-Model C schools that have to deal with this problem. Creating a culture of openness and tolerance is a very obvious part of the agenda of dealing with racism in suburban schools. However, dynamics of a racial, and often racist character, are regrettably part of the ethos of most schools in the country.
Racist attitudes continue to inform choices such as which staff are employed, which learners are admitted and how learners socialise during break. There is also evidence of discrimination against certain groups, for example, Shangaan speakers, Mozambicans and Nigerians, throughout the school system.
Most of us acknowledge the extent to which Bantu education – a form of institutionalised racism – deliberately deprived the majority of South Africans of the possibility of realising their intellectual potential. How do we restructure the education system, and the curriculum in particular, to deal with the legacy of the racist attitudes that we have all inherited?
Over the past 20 years, these issues have been debated in the British context. Multicultural education, which celebrates differences and encourages respect and tolerance, was initially seen as a way of combating racism in schools. While multicultural education is a step in the right direction, many teachers feel it does not go far enough in dealing with the problem of racism.
Multiculturalism, they argue, does not acknowledge and deal with conflict sufficiently. It is a myth that we are all one happy family of different cultures. Pre-judices run deep and need to be dealt with explicitly. What is required is an approach that does not shy away from talking about race but rather tackles racism head-on. This approach, in the British context, has become known as an anti-racist multi-cultural approach.
So how do we begin to introduce an anti-racist multicultural approach in South African schools? Investigating the effects of racism in the past, notably during World War II, provides an effective starting point for high school learners.
It was in this context that an exhibition of the artwork of the children of Terezin took place at King David Linksfield, a high school in Johannesburg. Terezin was a ghetto set up by the Nazis as a holding camp for Jews on their way to the death camps during World War II.
A total of 139 654 people were brought to Terezin. Of these, 33 000 died at Terezin itself and 83 000 were sent on to the death camps, where they were brutally murdered. They were among the six million Jewish people who died in the Holocaust as a result of the Nazis’ determination to wipe out the Jewish race. Of the 15 000 children who passed through Terezin, only 100 survived. None of these survivors was under the age of 14.
The Jews in Terezin felt that for as long as they lived, they should offer all they could to their community and especially the children. Chief among their priorities was education. Schools were set up inside Terezin and all the children who passed through there learnt whatever subjects could be offered under the circumstances.
One of these subjects was art – initiated by an artist called Friedl Dicker Brandeis. Using whatever materials could be mustered, she ensured that all the children learnt to draw and were given a way to deal with the extraordinary trauma they were experiencing. After the war, the drawings made by children were found and eventually made their way to the Prague Museum. They now bear witness to the horror of the Holocaust and the price paid by the children in particular.
The exhibition, which has been visiting South Africa, is a collection of these drawings, some of which are reproduced above. The idea of bringing the exhibition to South Africa was first raised by Asmal and supported by the Embassy of the Czech Republic and the Jewish Board of Deputies. The exhibition was opened by Judge Arthur Chaskalson, President of the Constitutional Court, who reminded the audience of the daily duty to fight racism and deprivation.
One of the great lessons of this very moving exhibition is that it speaks of the power of education. Even on the way to their deaths, these children were given the opportunity to develop their thinking and to explore their feelings through art. The artworks are compelling expressions of children trying to make sense of the terrible tragedy of which they were a part.
Acknowledging the relevance of these experiences for our own society, the organisers of the conference arranged for local schools to visit the exhibition and explore the common theme of racial violence in South Africa under apartheid and in Europe under the Nazis. More than 2 000 learners and teachers, representing 30 schools from Johannesburg and Alexandra, visited the exhibition and participated in the discussions.
The message of this exhibition is that we must never forget, and that what took place must never happen again. Has the world learnt anything from what happened at Terezin or from what happened under apartheid? Not if we consider the recent history of, for example, Rwanda-Burundi or Sierra Leone. The lesson is simple: racism dehumanises people and can lead to genocide. Our duty as educators is to fight racism in whatever form it may take.
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, Johannesburg, April 2001.