While watching the opening of the 26th sitting of the South African Parliament, I became convinced of one particular thought: we are where we are as a country because of the failure of our education system.
The worrying lack of national pride and ongoing chaos across the country is rooted in the pervasive chaos that reigns in our education system.
There is nothing fair about education in South Africa. If we continue to have these massive gaps in resources, services and opportunities between township schools and former Model C schools, someone needs to switch the lights off sooner rather than later.
It is wonderful to hear about the odd pupil from a township school that made it onto the list of top 100 matriculants in the country.
It is wonderful to hear of a black child from a private school that made it onto the list of the top 10 matriculants in a province. But that is exactly the problem.
We do not have a system that is engineered for mass success. Without such a system, we will continue to produce millions of poorly trained pupils for the bottom end of the labour market and 10 pupils that excel for the top spots in industry. If ever there was a reason for the coming revolt, then this is it.
In a recent education exercise, I heard first-hand of cases, where pupils in Grades 10 to 12, in the Eastern Cape, have no calculators for maths and science learning.
They, therefore, cannot do the calculations required, so those components are simply skipped.
They will fail those components in any exam. In another recent programme, in partnership with maths specialists the Olico Foundation, and the After School Game Changer Programme of the Western Cape Government, to test maths competency in pupils at low fee and no fee schools, we saw another interesting phenomenon. Of the over 100 Grade four pupils on the programme, who had to complete a computerised maths test, 28% worked on a computer for the first time in their lives on the day of the test.
Other compounded challenges in township schools are the trauma of daily violence, challenging family support systems, the lack of access to nutritious foods, the lack of basic resources and infrastructure, as well as the ongoing peer pressure to opt out of a system that is based on disadvantage, inequality and which lacks equity.
While we definitely have some brilliant children in our townships schools, the numbers are simply too low to celebrate.
The challenges that the vast majority of township pupils are battling, and their subsequent failure to even achieve the ridiculous 30% pass mark, is not an indication of their inability to learn nor of some predestination that they are to remain hewers of wood and drawers of water.
They are failing because an education system is failing them.
If we don’t take cognisance of the vast disparities between rich and poor schools, we will have to own the chaos. Township pupils will continue to drop out of a system that does not value them and opt for a life of significance and status, in gangs and crime. And they will commit violence against that very education system that failed to value them.
Young gangsters are not destroying schools in townships because they are irresponsible. They are destroying them because of the deep anger they have against an institution that was supposed to change their lives but, instead, made them feel unworthy, stupid and incompetent, and ultimately destroyed any hope of their future success.
If you wonder why people do not value something, look into how they were educated. If you wonder why our streets are dirty and our libraries are being destroyed, look into the environments they were educated in.
If we educate our young people as if they are barbarians, we train them for a future career in barbarism.
* Lorenzo A Davids is chief executive of the Community Chest.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.