What happens within classrooms is at the heart of all education. However progressive policy might be, however large the government’s education budget, and however many more young people enjoy their constitutional rights to basic education than was ever the case under apartheid (or colonially), the quality of the classroom experience determines all successes and failures.
And corporal punishment still emerges as a major controversy, despite the far greater post-1994 libertarian and progressive education policies.
The Emerging Voices report’s chapter five provides a mixed picture of ‘experience of the classroom”. Curriculum 2005 was introduced in 1997 to remove the ‘bias, discrimination and social injustice” that underpinned apartheid’s Christian National Education and Bantu Education.
But the new curriculum’s methodology – outcomes-based education (OBE) – draws fire in rural areas. More than half the report’s respondents (58%) were ‘dissatisfied” with OBE. Limpopo teachers were especially unhappy (67%), followed by KwaZulu-Natal (59%) and the Eastern Cape (49%). Teachers supplied many reasons, including:
Different groups of respondents provided their perspectives:
They do not think their teachers have significantly changed their classroom practices, still requiring prayers before teaching begins. And ‘we just keep quiet and respect our lady teacher and do corrections”, one learner’s essay says. ‘She raised questions and we respond to her.”
Learners also said they have difficulty understanding what their teachers are saying – though ‘why this is the case is unclear”.
One characteristic school in KwaZulu-Natal has had a great deal of NGO assistance over some years, ‘and so should have shown some improvements over other schools”, the report says. ‘Unfortunately, it did not.”
The visitors to this school found classrooms unattended by teachers, and learners surrounded by learning materials in a language they do not understand, ‘and without possessing even rudimentary arithmetical knowledge”.
Some see corporal punishment as normal. ‘But learners experience it as abusing their rights within education.” Parents and learners share one common vision: both see a link between education and development.
‘Possibilities exist for the development of a culture of human rights and democracy
in classrooms,” the chapter concludes, ‘but they require new relationships between teachers and learners.” This will enable classrooms to become ‘more than the white elephants of development”.
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