SCHOOL FEEDER ZONES TO BE SCRAPPED
GAUTENG’S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION this week announced that it would be scrapping feeder zones for schools following a proposed bill, which gives the public 30 days to comment.
The new feeder policies will start by 2020 in Gauteng and education MEC Panyaza Lesufi is hopeful other provinces will follow suite.
The aim of the first post-apartheid education feeder-zones policy, according to Lesufi, was to finally bury apartheid’s spatial (urban) planning in the country’s education system.
Once this proposed bill has been adopted, Lesufi says it will allow schools to recruit learners across a wide range of communities.
While some might view this as a minor victory in the fight against apartheid and dismantling its policies, there is much more below the surface that still needs to be addressed to fully grasp the discriminative nature of feeder-zone policies.
What is indicative about the feeder zones is that apartheid did not end in 1994, as purported by our political parties.
Its remnants are still prevalent in our education system as well as in the corporate world.
The settlements reached at the Codesa negotiations in the early 1990s ensured that those who benefited from apartheid could continue with impunity to exclude blacks from proper educational structures around the country on the basis that “we did not belong there”.
For more than 25 years, since the dawn of South Africa’s constitutional democracy, black parents have had to force and fake addresses in the suburbs of Durban North, Westville, umhlanga, Ballito and Amanzimtoti and elsewhere just so that they could enrol their children in schools in those areas.
In some instances, black pupils were often refused entry because they stay outside the 5km radius of the school their parents wished them to attend, regardless of whether they could afford it.
Lesufi said: “It can’t be that you were born in an area with lots of schools and those who were born in an area with fewer schools are denied access to education.”
For many blacks who grew up in the 1990s and early 2000s in these “Model C” schools, this groundbreaking initiative has undoubtedly brought back a flood of painful memories from a past that has been characterised by humiliation and anxiety.
Imagine as an 11-year-old learner in a primary school, you are the only black child in a class full of white kids, and you are constantly reminded that you do not belong there?
The favourite condescending line of many white educators, that I and many others have witnessed in these schools is:
“Why don’t you go to a school in Kwamashu where you come from?”
The pain and humiliation this one line alone inflicts on a child whose parents are trying to provide the best for is tantamount to a form of emotional abuse.
The discriminatory practice of feeder zones must be rooted out and discarded in the dustbins of our history.
The next step is ensuring that schools in the townships and rural areas are provided with enough resources to ensure that they are modernised effectively in order to attract the best minds and help build our communities.