Minister of Education Kader Asmal has welcomed the report of the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) into initiation practices at education institutions.
Asmal says his department will work together with provincial colleagues and education role players to develop the necessary policy to give effect to the recommendations in the report. The minister believes that initiations at educational institutions such as schools and universities are inhumane and are in conflict with the Bill of Rights.
It is for this reason, after receiving a flood of complaints and representations from parents and victims of initiation practices, that Asmal approached the SAHRC to conduct an investigation into this matter at schools and tertiary institutions.
Asmal expressed support for the recommendations outlined in the report and shares the commission’s view that all initiation practices should be abolished and prohibited, because they cannot be transformed as they are intrinsically bound up with notions of submission, exclusion and humiliation.
Asmal furthermore agrees that orientation programmes, which seek to introduce students, in a dignified manner, to their new institutional environment should be supported, as opposed to initiation practices, which “humiliate individuals into an authoritarian system of discipline”.
Asmal says initiation practices do not exist in isolation, and go to the heart of the need to fundamentally transform existing institutional cultures at education institutions with respect to the extent to which they provide a safe, secure and inclusive teaching and learning environment. He therefore endorses the commission’s proposal on the need for a value-based approach to the transformation of an institutional culture.
“This approach falls squarely within the broader programme of the ministry through our Values in Education initiative, which seeks to identify and promote those values that our education institutions ought to embrace, which are the foundation of our democracy and on which our future depends,” says Asmal.
– The Teacher/M&G Media, Johannesburg, November 2001.