Durban - Professor Jonathan Jansen urged Durban parents on Wednesday not to accept shoddy standards when it came to their children’s education.
Jansen advised parents of the seven ways they could protect their own children (and others) from South Africa’s “race to the bottom” in education.
Jansen was speaking to the parents as a guest of an organisation called the Youth Education and Support Trust, which works to secure funding for promising pupils or students who cannot afford a high school or tertiary education.
He said failure had become “institutionalised” in South Africa’s education system. Low expectations and dismal standards had become so embedded in the everyday life and fabric of schools (and universities) that everyone thought it normal.
Jansen listed the ways in which low education standards became “the new normal”:
* It crept up gradually, one policy at a time, and presented itself as reasonable – who would not want all children to pass?
* It had to come from on high – who could doubt the authority of a senior politician?
* It had to look backwards all the time, justifying present malpractice with what had happened in the past.
* It had to carry a not-so-subtle racial threat to those who opposed it: “The interests of the black child are being attacked”.
Examples of low standards in education included the policy which allowed pupils to fail only once between grades 10 and 12, and the Grade 9 school-leaving certificate which Basic Education Minister Angie Motshekga announced she was developing during her budget speech earlier this year.
Jansen told the parents gathered that there were seven things they could do to counter mediocrity in the schooling system:
* Set their own standards of achievement for their children, and “do not budge”.
* Pay for extra classes by high-quality tutors. “Your child only has one chance to do well at school.”
* Parents should create their own extramural education experience. “Assume that what your child learns at school is hopelessly inadequate for the 21st century”.
* Fund at least one poor child to attend a high-quality school, but start with the youngest pupils.
* Take the fight for quality education to schools. Ask the principal what they were doing to counter the low standards set out in government policy.
* Start a movement against poor education, or join one (such as Equal Education).
* Put money into projects designed to turn around dysfunctional schools.
Earlier on Wednesday, Jansen spoke on social justice and transformation at the conference of the Society of Law Teachers of Southern Africa, held at Varsity College.
He warned that to use the word transformation carelessly was to “privilege numbers over minds” and risk social cohesion because of division and bitterness among citizens.
Access to university was a matter of social justice, he said, but transformation was about universities ensuring that those students graduated and excelled in the job market.
“Social justice is about black children accessing former white schools, transformation is about all children recognising themselves in the textbooks used by those schools.”
Jansen said that unemployment and inequality in South Africa could not be fixed until schools were fixed.
That most schools were dysfunctional was the fundamental problem facing the country.
The Mercury