The virtual collapse of discipline at many schools in SA poses a serious threat to the delivery of quality education and cannot be allowed to continue unfettered. The general assumption is that schools are places where teaching and learning take place.
In the absence of discipline, no education can take place.
Discipline is therefore an essential ingredient to ensuring the success of the teaching and learning endeavour.
According to recent reports, the lack of discipline in schools continues to push many teachers into early retirement. At some schools, teachers claim that it takes 25 minutes to get the pupils settled during a 40-minutes class. More than half of teaching and learning time is laid to waste and this is not sustainable.
Also, pupils do not do their homework and are generally confused about why they are at school in the first place. There are even claims that some of them smoke dagga, even at the age of seven or eight.
Lord have mercy.
More ominously, some schools have become war zones and crime scenes where pupils are stabbed to death, intimidated with guns and teachers threatened or have their cars damaged.
At Northbury Park Secondary in Pietermaritzburg, rampaging pupils destroyed school property and set a teacher’s car alight after the teacher had confiscated a pupil’s cellphone in class.
The absence of discipline in schools renders them dysfunctional and this is punctuated by the late arrival and early departure by both teachers and pupils. Violence, vandalism, lack of parental support and poor academic performance are some of the manifestations of this dysfunction. The essence of school is lost as the priority shifts from teaching and learning to school safety.
Education experts such as Mary Metcalfe cite the lack of discipline at home as the root cause and poor leadership and weak management in schools. She correctly argues that schools have to have rules to manage pupils. It is the understanding and support of these rules that can restore functionality so that effective teaching and learning can take place.
Other education commentators ascribe the breakdown of discipline to the lack of religion in schools while others lament the abolition of corporal punishment as having contributed to violence there. Against this background the pertinent question becomes, “are schools completely powerless to arrest this tide of ill-discipline? Are schools and by extension education, at the mercy of pupils?”
The answer to these questions is an emphatic NO. The South African Schools Act 84 of 1996 empowers schools. It gives them authority to draw up codes of conduct through SGBs comprised of elected parents, teachers, support staff and the employer through the principal.
The code of conduct (COC) spells out the rules regarding pupil behaviour and describes the disciplinary system to be implemented by the school concerning transgressions by pupils. The COC must be reviewed at least every year by all stakeholders. But it is the implementation of the code that is the schools's major undoing.
Teachers are the agents of this implementation and they need to engage in activities such as keeping records of pupil behaviour. Such information is collated into a dossier that can strengthen the school’s case during a disciplinary hearing. Teachers should also ensure the dissemination of information about children's behaviour to the parents. All pupils attending a school are bound by the COC and any violation of the code will result in disciplinary steps against the pupils to restore acceptable behaviour.
According to Dr Shaheda Omar, director of clinical services at the Teddy Bear Clinic, discipline means teaching acceptable behaviour and unlearning maladaptive behaviours by supporting, guiding and directing the children.
“It is about setting limits, and clarifying a predictable, orderly and stable life. It is not punitive and is in the best interest of the child,” Omar said.
Alternatives to corporal punishment may include reward charts, merit and demerit systems, the taking away of privileges, time-outs, detention and picking up litter.
It is time that schools take back the initiative from the miscreants and implement disciplinary systems that will ensure that the education of children, and the black child in particular, can no longer be postponed, negotiated or compromised.
For good measure, the Good Book affirms, in Proverbs 15:32, “Those who disregard discipline despise themselves, but the one who heeds correction gains understanding.”
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