Schools epicentres of poverty and hotbeds of criminality

Metro police conduct a search for illegal narcotics at Walmer Secondary School in Cape Town. The writer says violence in government schools is on the rise and closures abound, while low-fee private schools are springing up everywhere. Photo: Cindy Waxa

Metro police conduct a search for illegal narcotics at Walmer Secondary School in Cape Town. The writer says violence in government schools is on the rise and closures abound, while low-fee private schools are springing up everywhere. Photo: Cindy Waxa

Published Dec 5, 2014

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SCHOOL shootings are one of society’s most horrifying crimes. In the US where data is readily available, between 1990 and 2014 634 students were killed or seriously injured in 198 shooting incidents at schools.

School shootings, where a student discharges a gun at or near a school or on a school bus, are rare. In 2013, there were 77.8 million students enrolled in US schools – 16.6 million of them in high school – and just 33 “shooters”.

Rampage killings, where five or more students are killed in a single incident, numbered just 12 in the past 15 years, with 11 people killed in a typical rampage.

It is difficult to ascertain the motivation for school shootings, for three reasons. First, the overwhelming majority of shooters kill themselves at the end of a rampage.

Police have retraced shooters’ steps and cite various hypotheses for school shootings, including undetected mental illness, a keen desire for notoriety or infamy, and adverse reactions to prescribed psychiatric drugs.

None of these causes has stood up to scrutiny. Second, gun control laws in many countries, especially the US, are hotly contested. Proponents of “armed classrooms” want teachers to carry guns and argue this will reduce fatalities in school shootings.

Opponents cite the “weapons effect”, where simply being in the presence of a weapon appears to increase feelings of aggression.

Third, in many parts of the world school shootings are seen to be characteristic of Western, especially US, depravity, making it impossible to untangle the ideologies from the facts.

Two things are known with certainty about school shootings. They are overwhelmingly perpetrated by male students from nuclear families in middle-class neighbourhoods, and they are intimately linked to school bullying.

According to the US National School Safety Center, 3.4 million students are physically attacked in secondary schools each year; 87 percent of students say school shootings are motivated by a desire to “get back at those who have hurt them”; and 86 percent of students say “other kids picking on them, making fun of them or bullying them” causes teenagers to turn to lethal violence in schools.

Bullying in South Africa is a great deal worse. According to Unicef’s 2012 Study of Violence Against Children in South Africa, 20.5 percent of boys and 15.1 percent of girls are victims of bullying; 20 percent of sexual abuse incidents occur in schools; and 34 percent of people who rape children are teachers. Nearly half of young people aged between 12 and 24 have experienced some kind of cyber-bullying and, in most of these cases, the victims did not know who was behind the attacks.

As attempts to stem physical bullying have grown, around 6 percent of students aged 12 to 18 report being cyber-bullied each year. Amanda Todd, the teenager who killed herself after being bullied and harassed when private photographs of her appeared on the internet, posted a suicide video on YouTube that has to date garnered 62.7 million views, suggesting that interest in and experience of bullying is widespread.

According to SA’s Centre for Justice and Crime Prevention, “Good schools prevent and address bullying, and deal with incidents of bullying quickly, firmly and fairly. Bad schools deny it, ignore it, justify it, sweep it under the carpet and blame the victim and their parents.”

Naturally, criticism of South Africa’s government schools has focused on the quality of education, and rightly so. It is a scandal to many black South Africans for whom government schools are the only option that the interests of 386 000 unionised teachers are put ahead of the interests of 12.3 million children.

Teachers’ unions have succeeded in banishing inspectors from classrooms. Teachers’ unions have refused to allow learner performance to be used as a measure of teacher performance.

Teachers’ unions were the prime movers in reducing passing grades to artificially boost pass rates. Unions have made strategic use of “closed” and “agency” shop agreements, which compel workers to join a union as a pre-condition for getting a job or to pay union dues whether they belong to the union or not. It is now possible in government schools for a teacher to be appointed who has never been interviewed by the principal.

If one considers that education is the single most important factor, not only in obtaining that first job on which one’s entire career depends, but also in the promotion of civic virtues such as the demand for an effectively functioning state, it is easy to see how the SA Democratic Teachers’ Union is the leading cause of inequality of income and opportunity between the races in post-apartheid South Africa.

Bullying data suggest that government schools are not only epicentres of poverty but also hotbeds of criminality. Alarmingly, 54 percent of South African males who reported ever having raped someone were, themselves, bullied or harassed at school, speaking to a perpetual cycle of violence.

Thankfully, the black middle class is voting with its feet. Last year, enrolments at low-fee private schools which employ retired teachers and charge around R350 per pupil per month shot up by 27 percent whereas government school enrolments fell by 6 percent. Government school closures abound, even as low-fee private schools are springing up everywhere.

Whether deliberately or ineptly, provincial education departments are rubber-stamping just about every application to start a low-fee private school. This should make starting a school even easier.

Loane Sharp is economist with the Free Market Foundation

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