Ramaphosa’s ignoring PIRLS of wisdom

“IF YOUR child stops going to school, you must inquire, you must ask that child why they don’t go to school,” said President Cyril Ramphosa, at the official launch of the South African Police Service’s anti-gang unit (AGU) in Hanover Park, Cape Town.

This would be excellent advice, if he meant it. Imagine if we actually took the time to ask children – really ask them – why they’re resisting school. We could discover which children are being bullied.

We could find out which children have come to see themselves as stupid and are trying to avoid daily shaming. We might find out which children are being sexually abused by teachers and peers. We might find out which children are struggling to cope.

We’d find out who is bored, who is lost, and who has talents and passions that school is crushing out of them.

We might even find out which teachers to hire and fire, and even better, figure out how the whole school experience needs to be evolved to better suit children’s actual needs.

We might realise an outmoded colonial-style, authoritarian education prevents children from developing the real skills and knowledge they need for life in the Fourth Industrial Revolution – and that they know it.

In a place like Hanover Park, we could find out what school-children fear and why, and help figure out strategies to keep them safe.

We could identify potential gang members and ways to help them turn their lives around.

Unfortunately, the rest of our president’s words show he currently means exactly the opposite.

By threatening to jail parents who don’t force their children to attend school, he clearly means: rhetorically demand of your child “Why are you not going to school! Get yourself to school right now!”. In other words, force your child to attend school, without actually, really asking why they have stopped.

Unfortunately, it seems that our still-new president has not yet had time to read the PIRLS report for himself, or noticed that South African education comes stone last out of the 50 participating countries and hasn’t seen any improvement in half a decade.

Instead, it seems he’s parroting Gauteng MEC Panyaza Lesufi’s usual line of scapegoating others for departmental failures.

Our president apparently accepts the assurances of his comfortably entrenched education department that all is well, and that South African schools are good and worthy places where potential gangsters will be educated and rehabilitated – rather than driven deeper into resentment, despair, and rebellion.

To “insist and push our children to go to school, without any compromise” is a very dangerous thing to do, sir.

It allows a broken, dysfunctional education system to stay safely and conveniently the same and continue to destroy the children forced into it.

Around 60% of SA’s first graders currently drop out before matric.

That’s a majority! So, please, President Ramaphosa, please, ask those dropouts – and the ones preparing to drop out – “why?”. And then, please, tell the adults to “shut up and listen”, really listen to the answers, “because we are discussing a very serious matter that has to do with the lives of” each and every young South African.

South African law states that “every child that is of such an age, maturity and stage of development as to be able to participate in any matter concerning that child has a right to participate in an appropriate way and views expressed by the child must be given due consideration”. (Children’s Act, Section 10)

Mariëtte Reyneke, Senior Lecturer in Department of Procedural Law and Law of Evidence, University of the Free State, points out in her paper published in De Jure (Pretoria) vol. 46, Jun 1, 2013 that “the Department of Education, principals, educators and the school governing body are obliged to respect, protect and promote the child’s participation rights in schools.”

So why, even in the tiny handful of schools which even try to nod to this obligation, are children voting on dress code and what to have in the tuckshop? Why are they not included in a real way, as assistants in co-creating an education system that can actually work? Education cannot meet the needs of children while we continue to decide, without consulting them, what children need.

It cannot meet the needs of children while we continue to meet adult political, career and economic aspirations at children’s expense.

Organising teachers into unions without providing students with a real voice is like organising managers into unions while excluding the workers.

It is always the most disempowered, the ones at the bottom, that most need a voice.

Please, Bra Cyril, Comrade Cyril – man who was once a student activist, man who organised thousands of union members to become hundreds of thousands in just a few short years – bring the magic of democracy into South African education.

Please, Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, use your unique experience and skills for the good of our youth.

Help our learners to organise and to have a voice and to advocate for what they need. Empower them.