The matric exam season is upon us. And once again it is the fate of black children that hangs precariously in the balance; it is they who will be hardest hit by the interruption in classes earlier this year during the public-service strike.
More worrying, however, is the silence of their parents on the matters that affect their children. Once again black parents have ceded their responsibilities to the Congress of South African Students (Cosas), the organisation for high-school learners. Almost daily Cosas announces its plans for black children, as though the learners they represent are under no legal guardianship.
But why blame Cosas? It has found the proverbial gap in the market and is exploiting it. With the perennial chaos in the education system, somebody was bound to find this niche. Cosas got there first.
Cosas says matric examinations should not be set centrally because the government has not provided textbooks, as it promised. It says the catch-up plan to make up for time lost during the public-service strike is not working because teachers can’t be bothered.
And because these things affect township and therefore black children, setting exam papers centrally will prejudice black kids unfairly.
In all of this, the parents of those children whose fate is being discussed by other kids appear tongue-tied. They have allowed themselves to be led by their children. For some reason they would rather raise their voices in protest because the South African Broadcasting Corporation has failed to clinch a deal that allows the screening of football matches or lament the departure of some soapie star. But, when it comes to the future of their children, it becomes someone else’s business.
Cosas, to its credit, has taken up issues affecting black learners regularly. The organisation’s methods might be questionable, but it is difficult to dismiss it out of hand.
It was Cosas that asked questions when the impasse between the Gauteng education department and bus companies, contracted to ferry schoolchildren to and from schools, effectively robbed learners of education. Again parents idly looked on as a group of children took on the government.
It is this fixation of making heroes out of children that has emboldened Cosas and made it believe parents of school-going children are irrelevant.
Children — for those are who make up the membership of Cosas — who should be worried about pimples and the discovery of the possible pleasures (and dangers) of sex are now at the coalface of political and policy debates, while their parents go about their normal business.
Take Khutsong. Children there have not been to school for most of the year, in protest against the incorporation of the township into North West, while their parents, equally unhappy about the planned move, have gone on with their lives.
Iconic as Tsietsi Mashinini or Hector Petersen might have been, they belonged to a different era. Unlike Mashinini and Petersen’s parents, many of the parents whose children are now led by Cosas voted the government into power. Surely that must count for something.
Parents traumatised by living under apartheid — who also experienced a diminishing of their authority in the home as children rebelled against the apartheid system — need to recognise that those times are past. Stepping up to the plate and taking their place in society and in the lives of their children will not cause them jail time or banishment.
If they cannot reclaim their children from the likes of Cosas, they should demand that the government ensure their children’s right to a life free of the fatalistic ghetto cycle that makes young people believe they are condemned to living on the margins of society.
The crimes of our previous oppressors are numerous, went an old struggle poem. But to make adults of children surpasses the ordinary meaning of words.
Black parents need to wrest control of their children’s fortunes from Cosas and allow their children to be children. For, even with the best intentions, we cannot afford the fortunes of a new generation to be left to the whims of excitable adolescents, no matter how well meaning they might be.
One of the many excuses we hear for these nonchalant parents is that they are from marginalised communities and do not know how to engage the government, or that they have been so brutalised by the system that they will accept whatever goes.
But it is precisely their marginalisation that should make them enraged when their children are slowly being led into that fatalistic circle. They should know better than everybody else that to those whom the political gods want to destroy or dominate forever, they first deny education.