Ivor Baatjies on 'The Crisis in Public Education'

Teaching the dream curriculum in nightmare conditions

Siphokazi Magadla, Bokamoso

One of the enduring memories I have of my life in high school is of my then young brilliant Grade 10 History teacher holding the textbook warning us (paraphrased): “I will teach you this, but just remember that most of it is not history, it is lies”. At that moment I recognised the contested and political nature of the school curriculum.

The conversations about the ‘crisis in education’ often focus on the appalling environment in which teachers and learners are placed in developing and poor countries. South Africa is no different in this regard. If it is not the image of the teacher standing in front of over a hundred students in a small class room with barely any space to pace up and down to get better acquitted with the learners, it is often the lack of delivery of textbooks, chairs/desks and other important material that create an environment that allows teachers and learners to get on with engaging the curriculum offered to them. In this context, it is easy to assume that curriculum is also another aspect of the crisis. This is why I have been most surprised to see the substantive transformation of the high school curriculum which, in the midst of everything else that is not functioning well in education, is often overlooked.

“A Talk to Teachers”

James Baldwin: “A Talk to Teachers” by TigersEye99

The Education Crisis is a Disgrace to the Nation

A Young Ayanda Kota

The Education Crisis is a Disgrace to the Nation

The ANC‘s hatred for poor black people can never be forgiven

As I set my foot in the prison cell I am confronted by two men in their late thirties and five young boys who seem to be between seven and thirteen years old. I reach up to them in horror and assure them of their safety as long as I am around. They immediately tell me that they are being sodomised by the two men. I ask them why are they are in prison and not at school. They tell me that they dropped out because their parents are unemployed and broken, that the school is short of teachers and those that are employed there spend most of their time outside classroom. They tell me that they were arrested for burglary, caught eating inside a house. I wake up crying. Yes this was a dream. A nightmare that is all too real in this country where the lives of people who are poor and black count for nothing – this country where strikers are massacred by the police, people die trying to find work, people die in shack fires year after year, lesbians are raped, beaten and murdered and activists are chased from their homes by the thugs of the ruling party. And millions of children are denied a decent education and condemned to lives of unemployment or occasional bits of degrading, exhausting and always precarious work.

Tweeting with a conscience

by Percy Zvomuya, Mail & Guardian

Nomalanga Mkhize

It is appropriate that historian, educator and television presenter Nomalanga Mkhize’s Twitter tagline comes from ­Brazilian educator, philosopher and influential theorist of critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire.

The Brazilian wrote that “the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption” and Mkhize’s activism and Twitter discussions attest to that.

Punishing Youth

by Henry Giroux, CounterPunch, 11 August 2012

There is by now an overwhelming catalogue of evidence revealing the depth and breadth of the state sponsored assault being waged against young people across the globe, and especially in the United States. What is no longer a hidden order of politics is that American  society is at war with its children, and that the use of such violence against young people is a disturbing index of a society in the midst of a deep moral and political crisis.  Beyond exposing the moral depravity of a nation that fails to protect its youth, the violence used against American youth speaks to nothing less than a perverse death-wish, especially in light of the fact that As Alain Badiou argues, we live in an era in which there is zero tolerance for poor minority youth and youthful protesters and “infinite tolerance for the crimes of bankers and government embezzlers which affect the lives of millions.” 

James Baldwin on Education