Witteklip Secondary in Unit Five, Chatsworth, has one of the worst reputations of any school in the Durban township: it is said to be violent, rundown, riddled with problems and a dumping ground for expelled cast-offs from other schools in the area.
Yet it has managed to progressively turn around a matric pass rate that was less than 30% in 2000 to more than 90% last year, garnering a certificate of excellence award from the KwaZulu-Natal education department.
However, exam results are not the only reflection of what is happening at Witteklip. “You have to look at [your role as a teacher] holistically. If you approach teaching in this school just as an educator, then you will tear your hair out,” says principal Gopie Naidu.
He shows the Mail & Guardian the financial register of Welfare of WitteÂklip (Wow), a club started 22 years ago by the school’s teachers, which raises funds from a network of friends and family. The money is used to improve the social and educational environment of the pupils who study here. Inside the book is a list of contributions made to cover expenses such as outstanding utility bills for pupils’ homes and the school fees paid on behalf of pupils (the recovery rate of school fees is less than 25%).
“The learners here have problems. Many come from broken homes; their parents are alcoholics or drug abusers. Some have been abandoned, others are abused and most learners here have little or no self-esteem. For most, school is a preference to their homes. You have to look at it holistically, if the learners are not happy, if they have problems, then you’re not going to get results,” says Naidu.
He says the school has not expelled a troublesome pupil in more than five years. A teacher, who chose to remain anonymous, says “there are no walls between teachers and pupils here, we encourage them to tell us anything, to get things off their chests”.
The various letters in the Wow register and pupils’ testimonies seem to confirm this. Bongani Mthembu (not his real name), who is 18 years old, tells the M&G about peer pressure leading to alcohol binges that sometimes lasted as long as four days. He says he no longer drinks alcohol after being subjected to a sustained “good cop, bad cop” routine by a number of teachers in the school.
Chatsworth, a sprawling apartheid-era ghetto with more than 300Â 000 residents, has a high unemployment rate and a shortage of sporting and recreational amenities. The township’s schools are plagued with problems similar to those found across the country: pupils admit to taking drugs and parents complain about the rampant promiscuity among teenagers, with some selling sex to obtain drugs or buy clothes and cellphones.
“If the status quo remains then we have a very serious problem in this country, because we are creating a generation of very violent people,” says Sam Pillay, a former teacher and chair of Chatsworth’s Anti-Drug Forum, which has been tackling the scourge of the abuse of “sugars” — a cheap combination of residual cocaine and heroin — that predominates among youth in Chatsworth.
“With the recent spate of school violence people are talking about sensors and metal detectors, but nobody is talking about the society these children come from; about why these children have become so violent,” he says.
Pillay is a proponent of the holistic approach to education and believes it is imperative that teachers move away from considering their role as “merely to develop the cognitive and intellectual needs of children. They have to be more involved and become the catalysts for children to get their confidence back and engage with who they are.”
But some teachers argue that they lack the training and the time to become more involved. Nakoda says, “with OBE [outcomes-based education] I went for training for one week and was expected to come back and teach a new style and curriculum to kids when I was swimming in the dark myself. The two major problems are that kids don’t have other things to do, like sporting activities, and that the guidance counsellors and physical education teachers have been removed from schools. With the workload and filling in for absent teachers, life orientation teachers have no spare time for one-on-one counselling and guidance with children anymore.”