This education bill can break your heart

BELA was my first girlfriend, but she left me for another woman.

This BELA can also break your heart, the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill.

Long in the making, the proposed amendments to the SA Schools Act (Sasa) and one other are a mix of the ordinary, the sensible, the contentious and the fanciful.

Ordinary. Teachers cannot conduct business with the state. Yawn. Of course not, they are state employees.

School governing bodies must disclose their financial interests. Yawn again. That’s called good governance.

Homeschool learners must be registered.

Of course, how else would the government know how many children are being taught outside the public school system?

These ordinary measures fall under the category of commonsense in education policy.

Just imagine some of these measures applied to the government making them, for example that government officials should not conduct business with the state!

On the other hand, what a useful piece of legislation to throw public scrutiny of official corruption in education off the trail of prying eyes.

Sensible. Corporal punishment is outlawed as well as initiation (hazing practices). I thought it already was.

Anyway, this is a useful reminder that adults laying their hands on children has no place in our democracy.

It would be nice, though, if the thought police in the department gave tons of workshops and materials on alternatives to corporal punishment.

It would be even nicer if those formulating these amendments did not beat their own children at home.

And it would be wonderful if we knew how exactly the ongoing practice of punishment in schools is going to be changed despite these provisions in law and policy.

In SA, punishment has been institutionalised in our public cultures — do a survey on whether we should bring back the death penalty and you’ll see — but this is a sensible reminder nonetheless.

Contentious. The head of education in a province now has the final say on a school’s language, admission or religion policy.

I have mixed feelings about this.

The democrat in me wants schools to decide for themselves.

The realist in me knows there are schools (not all of them) who wield these policies to exclude those who do not fit their racial or class or religious preferences.

That is a fact.

On the other hand, there are plentiful examples in the northern provinces where government apparatchiks are quite eager to snuff out the rights and choices of school governing bodies with respect to language policies, for example.

Tough one when you cannot trust the local school or the provincial authorities to act only in the best interests of all our children.

Fanciful. Grade R is the compulsory starting point for the school year at age six.

Nice, but how are we going to pay for this R12bn, by some estimates.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, we spend about R1,06bn per day on servicing the debt.

Correct. And if you work in poor and working class schools, classrooms are overcrowded because the government has no money for extra teachers (just like it has no money for unemployed medical school graduates, so it has to hustle).

New policy proposals or amendments to acts such as Sasa should not provoke uncontrollable laughter.

But I had a good howl when I read that our government is going to fine and/or send parents to prison (up to 12 months) if they do not send their children to school without good reason.

If you struggle to send hardened criminals to prison in this gangster paradise that is SA, how about criminalising parents instead? Easy pickings.

Stop laughing, they’re at least pretending to be serious.

Now, because school attendance is compulsory on paper — at least through grade 9 — tens of thousands of parents will be in serious trouble.

Truth is, these provisions are middle class fantasies that are completely out of touch with reality and they should be classed in more or less the same league as the vacuous Sona speech, which some media smartly dubbed Cyril in Wonderland.

Every morning when I drive to work there are scores of parents with young children at almost every traffic light begging for food or money.

These are not unreasonable people. Their lives are desperate. They cannot afford even modest school fees.

And in no-fee schools, they still have to find money for school lunch, basic school wear and, for some, transport.

Are you, my government, going to send all these people to prison?

I can assure you they don’t have money to pay your fines.

Fanciful is a generous word for this blindness, nay, cold-heartedness. Plain stupid is more appropriate.

To be fair, there have been widespread consultations on BELA.

To be honest, dear reader, your government does not care a damn about what you say because the majority in parliament will ram these proposals down your throat and ignore those thousands of pages of invited comments.

Calling for comments is there simply to pretend there was a democratic consultative process.

Otherwise, the opposition parties have promised to challenge the bill as it becomes an act in the courts.

They have to do something, I suppose, in an election year. Show muscle.

I miss BELA, my first girlfriend. She was much more honest about my prospects.