A wave of attacks on teachers is currently being meted out on the profession’s mainstay and backbone, by the same miscreants they are supposed to teach.
Parents are failing dismally to instil respect for humanity in their kids, judging by attacks on teachers, deadly attacks on fellow pupils, unruly behaviour, drinking alcohol, and smoking cigarettes and marijuana while in uniform before and after school.
Why is this untenable and ungovernable situation in SA allowed to spiral out of control, unchecked, on our watch by parents first, the SA government second and the SA Council of Educators third?
Through the advent of phones, with all types of gadgets included in them, it is plain to see on our news bulletins and in print what is a menacing problem of delinquency, and it is currently being meted out on our teachers and principals in our schools across the length and breath of SA.
Teachers are literally dropping dead at very young ages, collapsing into depression, at their wit’s end and generally leaving the profession they clearly love, for other jobs or other countries, which truly value their education and place constant vigilance on their educational ethos.
In SA, parents shunt their children off to former model C schools where classes very seldom breach 28 children to one teacher.
Of course those who can afford the exorbitant school fee costs pay them.
Then the next best bet for their bambinos’ education becomes the schools situated in the so-called coloured areas, albeit that these classes burgeon with up to 45 pupils-plus per teacher. These schools are also mostly the ones that accommodate the children of foreigners on our shores.
Even school governing bodies are being filled by foreigners at these schools as our local parents have no interest at all in their children’s schooling, extramural activities or when called to come to help chastise their children for delinquency at school.
Then one has, thirdly, the township schools, where education at some schools is nonexistent, with some schools practically closing down or combining to keep pupil numbers up.
Private schools and home schooling I won’t go into, as that is really a privilege parents can afford for their kids, due in the main to the availability of lucre.
No real transformation has taken place in the SA educational landscape, other than the shunting around of the integration problem.
The SA schooling environ remains largely unchanged.
That trend under colonialism and apartheid continues today, as policies in place are hopelessly inadequately policed and followed through by the powers-that-be.
The education system has been tampered with and changed so many times that I’m sure most teachers don’t even know what the educational system they are using currently is called.
Pupils carry out heinous crimes at school, and are slapped with a week’s ban and allowed back into the same classroom where the demeanour they are accused of happened.
Such kids should never be allowed back into the same school if their transgressions are of a serious nature.
Teachers and principals being hit by pupils, sworn at by pupils and ridiculed by miscreant juveniles, cannot be expected to fold their arms and accept the onslaught against them and their noble profession.
Teachers and principals suffer abuse from imbecilic parents who jump to defend kids who do wrong, disrupting the smooth flow of education at primary and secondary schools.
This status quo cannot be allowed to be the norm in SA.
- Denzyl Harper Korsten, Port Elizabeth