Indifference is the true crisis in education

THIS IS a message to Professor Jonathan Jansen, vice-chancellor of the University of the Free State.

I often put a favourite song on repeat for days, even a week. I like the feeling of getting stuck in one place sometimes.

But I definitely do not like where the South African basic education record has been stuck.

Your call to declare a crisis in basic education is critical because it forces us to acknowledge the catastrophe.

The problem with a stuck record is that people might be irritated by it initially, but, as a coping mechanism, they eventually become indifferent to it.

Some have actually mastered the art of indifference to the grim reality faced by many young people going through the basic education system.

Some of these indifferent people know only too well from their own experience what a poor basic education means for one’s life chances.

You asked how it was that communities could stop their own children from going to school over service delivery issues, thereby prejudicing their children’s future.

Some have put forward historical accounts, saying we are witnessing continuities with the past.

But these are often used to exonerate people from any accountability for the crisis.

The fact of the matter is that in troubled communities schools are safe havens for young people and that space must be defended by all of us.

We are failing ourselves and future generations. When you talked about there not being “enough of a felt sense of the miscarriage of justice”, you were saying we had become indifferent to the unfair position we are putting many young people in.

We have found ways to live with the crisis. That is the real problem.

Hatfield, Pretoria