SOME hard thinking about where our children are at is long overdue. There are just too many disturbing signs that all is not well with the nation’s youth. It will be interesting to see what the government’s new diversity directorate says when it releases a report on values in schools next month. Hopefully we’ll be publishing some of the findings of this report in the next edition of The Teacher.
For too long we have obsessed with the physical lacks in our schools — reduced teaching posts, budgets, salaries, textbooks, etc etc — but we’ve paid scant attention to the most important lack of all, the human factor. We’re forgetting that schools are social spaces, that they’re about human lives and human interaction. Nurturing learners into socially-aware people capable of having healthy relationships with each other is surely a critical function of schools.
But just what values are being taught? Clearly whatever education is happening, there is not enough nurturing to go with it. While schools can never do the job of parents, they can at least be caring. Yet in the hierarchy of educational needs out there, basic needs like love and a sympathetic ear seem to fall off the agenda.
Incidents like the tragic saga last month, which left 13 youngsters dead after a teargas attack on a disco in Chatsworth, KwaZulu-Natal, show how children of ever younger ages seem to be searching for escapism in any form. Had the mayhem not happened that fateful day most parents would have had no inkling that their children — some as young as nine and 11 — were drinking and partying in a crowded disco instead of being at friends’ houses or the movies or wherever they said they were going to be.
Just a few weeks before this, hundreds of youngsters were discovered in a nightclub on the East Rand in Gauteng getting smashed on a Monday morning. Experimentation is something most teenagers do, but there seems to be something sadly desperate about getting drunk in the morning. It conjures images of dogged self-annihilation fitting perhaps to the aged alcoholic, not the fresh-faced 12-year-old. It seems that children are getting older, younger. I joke that my own child is six going on 16, but I won’t find it so funny in a couple of years when I wonder whether she too isn’t bopping in a disco instead of staying over at her friend’s house.
Perhaps we underestimate the stresses on our children and we do not have enough people, with the right skills in our schools to help them along. The least the government’s diversity directorate can do is raise awareness around the need for counselling services in schools and for a value base that encourages people to have healthy and respectful relationships with each other. Otherwise, what of the future?
— The Teacher/Mail & Guardian, April, 2000.