There is an urgent need to critically analyse why parents opt to enroll their children at former Model C schools, and ignore schools within their surrounding areas, particularly in the township.
It was reported that many schools in Gauteng received more applications than they could accommodate, with the department indicating that 10 schools had been identified as high-pressure schools due to the said challenge. This admission crisis is precipitated by the parents’ lack of confidence in township schools to provide quality education to their children. The pertinent question in this regard is what is so fundamentally wrong with township schools that cannot be remedied? If the situation at these schools is not beyond redemption, why is it that parents do not throw every effort towards ensuring they succeed and become models of excellence?
The exodus from township schools creates a challenge where it becomes impractical from a financial point of view to keep them open. With the busing of children to other schools, they are left derelict. This gives rise to other challenges which include the fact that children have to wake up at ungodly hours to catch transport to school.
The added disadvantage is that these children are exposed to road hazards en route to and from school on a daily basis. In many instances, children are packed like sardines in the vehicles that transport them to school. Some are transported in goods vans which are not meant to transport human beings. More ominously, children become alienated from their immediate environment and set up for cultural confusion. Such alienation is then manifest in unacceptable and antisocial behavior that has entrenched itself at our schools.
It must be pointed out that parents are within their rights to send their children to schools of their choice. However, many of the reasons for opting for former Model C schools are without merit and spurious, to say the least. These include the misguided belief in the superiority of the standards of education at these institutions. There is also the false tendency of equating the mastery of the English language with intelligence. Some parents will go to an extent of ensuring their kids abandon their home languages and do not speak them even at home.
This is what the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls “the fallacious notion of the unassailable position of English in our languages.” What is clear is that this perception is the height of a worrisome self-hate and inferiority complex. Only a person who suffers from a debilitating identity crisis can renounce his or her indigenous language in favour of a foreign language. Such a person is in need of cultural awakening.
What the department of education needs to do is to embark on a drive to improve the quality of education at township schools in an effort to entice black parents back into these schools, which have produced many outstanding leaders of our society in varied fields including politics, business and academia. It was therefore encouraging that one of the so-called high pressure schools included a township school. Gauteng education MEC, Panyaza Lesufi could not resist the temptation to take the credit when he waxed lyrical, “for a mere fact that Inqayizivele Secondary in Tembisa, a township school, received the most number of applications is an indication that we have changed the landscape in the improvement of township education.”
There is still a lot that needs to be done, including the intensification of efforts to strengthen leadership at township schools. This can only be done if the department can eliminate the debilitating stranglehold of the anarchic Sadtu through its disproportionate influence in the appointment of school principals. Documentary filmmaker Molly Blank, who travelled the country in search of the best-performing schools, had this to say, “Having an inspirational figure at the head of the school will create a community of learning and hold teachers accountable.
They understand the power of education to change lives.” It is also a truism that the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers. To this end, there is a need to improve the quality of our teachers through in-service teacher training and initial teacher education. The role of parental involvement toward quality education can never be overemphasized.
Once these imperatives are put in place, school choice will no longer be determined by misguided perceptions of quality, but by proximity. Such a reality will reduce the occurrence of road fatalities which claim the lives of school children on their way to and from school instead of just walking and being exposed to less danger. Admission to a school should not be a crisis-ridden challenge. The integration of erstwhile polarised communities is good only if it is principled. Parents need to exercise caution when choosing schools for their children. This should not be for the sake of being in vogue because such a decision can come back to haunt them.
All it should take is a vision to return to the basics and ensure that all South African schools are excellent centres of quality education provision. This will obviate the need to bus children to schools far from their places of abode.
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