A niece and a nephew of mine started school this year. The inevitable conversations about uniforms and school bags, alongside blanket coverage of schools’ opening day, drove home several unpleasant realities about our education system.
I am glad that Warona and Sinesipo wake up to schools that are better resourced than the one I first enrolled in at the beginning of 1978. This is true at the most literal level as well as in more educationally significant ways. Education is part of the experience of freedom as lived reality rather than an abstract concept. Access to empowering education and educators makes a huge difference to the kinds of life choices that human beings can make.
Let me demonstrate. My primary school had broken windows, more than 70 students in a classroom, desks in various states of disrepair, no electricity, libraries or lab equipment. This was a normal state of affairs for deliberately neglected and under-resourced schools impoverished by the vicious apartheid state, and further battered by a selfish and brutal homeland administration.
Yet this school also had a long teaching history that seemed to mock its physical condition. The men and women who taught thousands of children at Lovedale Primary had an enormous task before them, and those teachers — who answered to the surnames Mali, Madyibi, Booysen, Sigila and others — rose to the challenge. In between school boycotts and refusing to mask their own indignation, they chose to teach much more than the Bantu education syllabus. They were exceptional teachers of content, critical thinking and the power of the imagination.
Miss Poswa asked me to reflect on the meaning of abanqolobi (terrorists) by asking ”Banqoloba bani, ngoba?” (who and why do they terrorise?) in response to a standard three composition — as we called essays in those days — that I was very proud of. I don’t remember what I had said about abanqolobi. But the question stayed with me.
Mr Mqhinqi impressed in me the importance of owning language and using it for your own ends. He said there was no point in deciding to learn a language poorly, even if the language was Afrikaans.
Miss Nomntu Mali, my all-time favourite teacher, said: ”We don’t have a library, and there is no money to build one; why don’t we each bring something we like to read or look at from home and put it in this cupboard, starting our own library?” And she made it fun and cool.
Teaching has always been an under-appreciated and appallingly compensated profession. It is clearly not being prioritised beyond very public talk of the ”challenges” in education. Why do we wonder about the shortage of teachers in our schools? Why should school leavers, knowing what they know, choose to teach, given the enormous ”challenges” they are guaranteed to face? Why should committed teachers stay in a profession that, in administrative terms, treats them like rubbish?
Mr Sigila, a sterling teacher passionate about science, is now a taxi driver. The conditions under which teachers have to work because of inefficient bureaucrats in his province, the Eastern Cape, pushed him out of a profession he loved. He is not alone.
My teachers made an impression on me during very trying times. In 2007 not all children in democratic South Africa have access to teachers of the calibre I had or even better schools than my generation did.
This is a travesty.
I am enraged by the fact that no matter how much money the national government allocates to education departments in the various provinces, books don’t arrive on time or buses meant to transport schoolchildren are not paid on time — or at all. Civil servants responsible for this play Russian roulette with people’s lives, hiding behind bureaucratic nonsense that often turns teaching into a nightmare.
I am tired of reminders that some civil servants do sterling work. They are all supposed to. As taxpayers, and voting citizens, we are entitled to a full and exact accounting of how much of the yearly education budget is returned unspent to the National Treasury. This should be accompanied by clear, jargon-free accounting for why much-needed funds are not being spent where they are allocated.
Otherwise we may as well give up on education and wait for our society to implode.
Pumla Dineo Gqola is extraordinary associate professor of English at the University of the Western Cape