Imagine a reality where your teenage child carries a knife, a screw driver or even a panga to school because he is a violent bully intent on harming others or believes he has to protect himself from fellow pupils at school.
Imagine a teacher who is anxious about going to work every morning, fearing intimidation and violence from pupils retaliating against authority.
An environment where rules have made way for anarchy and every day inside school gates is a dangerous battle for survival.
Such is the landscape of the SA schooling system, often highlighted by disturbing public images of violence that shock us for a while until the next incident grabs our attention.
School violence is not a new phenomenon in our country.
In fact those who better understand human behaviour often tell us what happens in schools, good or bad, is a microcosm of our broader society.
While this assessment is accurate, it perhaps unintentionally lulls us into the kind of reasoning that normalises the bloodshed and disarray that happen in schools.
It perhaps blinds us to what it means for the future of our society.
Just last week, there were reports from different parts of the country of a pupil stabbed to death, another who committed suicide, allegedly because of bullying, clashes between pupils and police and a school intruder shot dead by a teacher.
Worth noting is that these are incidents that we know of, those that happened to reach an inquisitive eye of social and other media.
They do not tell the full story of SA’s classrooms.
Importantly, they do not fully capture the deterioration in our social norms and values which historically formed the basis of our humanity and functionality as a society.
So what do we do?
Yes, we must look to authorities to provide the constitutional tools to keep our schools in check.
Yes, we need tighter security, better infrastructure and an efficient accountability framework for wayward behaviour.
We need knowledgeable, caring and empowered teachers and in worst cases, better policing.
But beyond all that, we must ask ourselves what about our society has broken so fundamentally that we simply look the other way when degeneration sets in at places meant to help build the future of our children.
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