MISSED CHANCE FOR REAL CHANGE
Educationist Jonathan Jansen discusses racial separation of pupils
South Africans had hardly recovered from a controversy around claims of beach racism in the posh Clifton suburb of Cape Town when, in the North West province, an angry black parent reposted a WhatsApp photograph of a classroom showing four black children sitting at a corner table near the door.
They were separated from a larger group of white children seated alongside each other in an extended chain of desks.
A Grade R teacher had apparently sent the photo to parents, including the distressed black parent, to show how their children were settling in on the first day of school.
The social media reaction was swift. Outraged citizens cried racism while others defended the teacher as politicians descended on the Laerskool Schweizer-Reneke in the North West province.
The public reaction defending the teacher’s actions was as distressing as it was predictable, going something like this: The separation was temporary; the photo does not capture what happened over the rest of the day. There were photos of other classrooms at the same school showing black and white children at the same desks interacting with each other. And the children were simply sitting with friends they knew; nothing racist about that.
But there was one set of arguments that merited another look – the children were merely being separated by language, presumably Setswana-speaking black children from Afrikaans-speaking white children. In other words, the children were being organised in order to facilitate mother-tongue education. In general, there are other educational grounds for separating children such as academic readiness or different ability groups, though we know nothing, of course, about the cognitive levels of these young learners.
The question remains: are there educational grounds on which the children at Schweizer-Reneke could have been separated? The straightforward answer is “no”.
Throughout South Africa, and abroad, children enter classrooms with different language backgrounds at all levels of formal schooling. In the early grades, in particular, a more defensible educational strategy is to place children together precisely because of the advantages offered by multilingual learning.
Young children, we know, learn languages much faster than adults. My godson, by the way, is an Afrikaans-speaking South African child who started preschool in English American classrooms and he became competent in both languages within days.
When it comes to mixedability grouping the research is very clear – there is no definitive advantage to being in sameability groups.
Lower-ability children benefit greatly from mixed classes and highly intelligent children tend to learn independently anyway and are not disadvantaged in mixed-ability groups.
The key factor is whether the teacher is competent to teach effectively in mixed-ability groups to the advantage of every child. Again, the point being made here is a general one about organising classrooms for effective learning, and is not necessarily applicable to this North West school.
So how does one explain the actions of the teacher in the Schweizer-Reneke primary school? In the pages of my book, Knowledge in the Blood, this kind of teacher makes a regular appearance. She is earnest, dedicated and narrowly competent, but largely unconscious of the social dimensions of learning.
Like her conservative peers she works with an everyday racial common-sense that makes it perfectly normal to put black children in one corner and white children in the centre of the classroom.
I guarantee that when the storm broke, the teacher’s real anguish was “what on earth did I do wrong?”
That is why suspending the teacher – rumour is they suspended the wrong teacher – achieves little more than offer political relief, even physical safety, from the storm brewing at the school gates.
That is why not transforming the school – the institutional conditions that made her actions routine – is where the department missed an opportunity for more effective longterm intervention in the education of all our children in this rural province.
Of course the teacher should be held accountable – but without corrective intervention not only does she remain a victim of her own apartheid education and its legacy but her commitment to teaching young children is potentially lost.
With more and more black children from poor communities demanding access to the few schools in rural areas that offer a technically good quality education, this crisis makes these formerly white Afrikaans rural schools even more vulnerable as far as Afrikaans language education is concerned.
I guarantee the teacher’s real anguish was ‘what on earth did I do wrong?’