The Mikro Primary School case has generated astonishing levels of noise and mud-slinging, ostensibly over language rights, in schools. But the case is, surely, fundamentally about school governance and the laws pertaining to that.
Last week the Supreme Court of Appeal upheld the Cape High Court’s judgement in February that the Mikro school governing body (SGB) had acted lawfully in arriving at its language policy — namely, instruction in Afrikaans — and in refusing admission to 21 English-speaking grade one pupils. The school had resorted to court action against the Western Cape education department’s instruction that it enrol the pupils. Mikro’s case was that its SGB had acted in accordance with school governance law.
The law in question is the South African Schools Act (Sasa), which details the powers of SGBs, including their right to decide which language (or languages) of instruction a school will offer.
Yet, the case has been racially and politically interpreted on all sides. Western Cape education minister Cameron Dugmore joined an African National Congress-organised toyi-toyi outside the Cape High Court in January.
This provoked Helen Zille, education spokesperson for the Democratic Alliance, to say Dugmore’s attempt to force Mikro to accept the 21 children was evidence of a “party political assault by the ANC against medium institutions [that] are required to sacrifice their language rights in the interests of the ANC’s definition of transformation”, and part of a “nationwide harassment campaign” against such schools.
Given our destructively racialised, and racist, language history, it is not difficult to understand why this Cape Town primary school’s case should have elicited such strong feelings. But both the Cape High Court and now the appeal court remind us that post-1994 legislation, in this case Sasa, protects the rights of all language groups — and that includes Afrikaans speakers.
The judgements from both courts clearly criticise the Western Cape education department’s attempt to interfere with the Mikro SGB’s entirely legal functioning. And it is worth recalling that the democratic powers accorded to SGBs to determine so much of their schools’ functioning was one of the great achievements of post-1994 education policy, after decades of iron-fisted and grossly intrusive apartheid social engineering.
So it is with some qualms that I find myself reading the Mikro case not solely in terms of language policy, but of school governance — and especially Minister of Education Naledi Pandor’s comments on SGBs and the Schools Act in her May education budget address.
Under the subheading “School governing bodies and language”, she acknowledged that the majority of SGBs set admissions policies, determine language selection and set fees with dedication and commitment to children’s welfare.
But she also said, entirely accurately, that some SGBs “have made public schools their personal property” instead of “promoting access, democratisation and quality”. She then made an undertaking that should have drawn more analysis than it has so far: “… I shall initiate a review of [Sasa] to identify ways in which [the Act] may be amended to respond to our challenges of access and transformation.”
Nothing sinister there, one might think — and hope. But if the review of Sasa results in curtailing the powers of SGBs and devolving some of them to the state, we could be on a slippery slope, one leading directly to apartheid-era centralised political control over schools.
Provincial education departments now constitute one of the most problematic area s in education. Their record of overall implementation of national policy is a constant source of despair.
One hopes that the Mikro case does not provide ammunition for those who want to change legislation in a way that results in schools being deprived of hard-won democratic rights of choice over their own identities and missions.