WE NEED TO LEARN FROM OUR FAILURES IN EDUCATION

by Terry Bell

The great youth uprising of 1976 was properly commemorated on June 16; the terrible sacrifices remembered along with the brutality of a racist and oppressive regime. There were also reflections on the changes wrought by those sacrifices and the events flowing from them.

All too often — and with considerable justification — the youth of 1976 were referred to as the lost generation; the students who forsook education in the cause of liberation. However, as many commentators have noted, the nature of 1976 schooling offered to those not classified “white” was of a standard that fell well short of any ideal of education.

So the students rebelled in the wake of the industrial resistance of the emerging modern trade union movement. The eruptions that followed arguably made the greatest contribution to the pressures that finally resulted in a negotiated transition. We owe much to the rebellious youth of that generation.

Today, despite all the gross and still racially biased inequalities that dog our schooling system ...

and provide a major reason for the high dropout rate at tertiary level, what we have, on a national scale, is still an improvement on what went before. How much of an improvement can be debated, but there can be no debate about the fact that the inequalities of the past have been deracialised: wealth and not pigmentation is the general determinant of whether a student is offered good, bad or inadequate schooling.

But we can learn much more from the errors of the past 16 years than we can by proclaiming how much better the situation is now than it was in the days of apartheid. The informed consensus is that our schooling system is in a mess, despite the relatively high percentage of national income spent on it.

But we need a long, hard and honest look at the past in order to understand what went wrong, when, where and how. And that should take us beyond our borders to the greatest failed educational opportunity ever presented to a new, anti-racist and democratic South Africa; back to the thousands of young people, many with greater initiative and commitment than most of their fellows, who decided — or were forced — to flee into exile.

Like the rest of the ’76 generation in South Africa, they had no choice but to fight or continue to suffer academically inadequate schooling with generally poorly qualified teachers in vastly under-resourced schools. Their fleeing persuaded an ANC newly revitalised by the rebellions on the home front to establish a school that would provide “education for liberation”.

Such a school would be based on the most modern, democratic principles as befitted the country’s premier liberation movement. This would include none of the coercive methods of Bantu and, indeed, Christian National schooling, primarily corporal punishment. It would abolish the distinction between mental and manual labour and equip students with the motivation and academic and technical skills that would help shape a new South Africa. This was the sort of school many students dreamed of, but most of the hierarchy of the ANC saw as their model, the authoritarian, strap wielding mission schools of yore.

This conflict between policy and intended practice was not evident at the time and the Tanzanian government provided a large tract of land on a former sisal estate, north of the town of Morogoro to house the school complex. Solidarity support poured in. On paper the project seemed marvellous. And it was something of a public relations coup: a liberation movement gearing up to prepare motivated, democratic and anti-racist students who would eventually spearhead the development of a new South Africa.

The promise was to create a school based on self-sufficiency and that would meld mental and manual labour in a co-operative and democratic environment. It never happened. Brutal punishments were the order of the day and manual work was used as a form of punishment. The autocratic cultures of Bantu and mission school education dominated in an environment where nationalists battled for control with members of the SA Communist Party.

Staff also enjoyed grossly disproportionate privileges and the bulk of the manual work — including domestic labour in some staff houses — was carried out by Tanzanian workers. Students — representatives of the ’76 generation — often maintained that conditions in Soweto were preferable to those in Somafco, with the result that there was a constant mood of sullen rebellion.

I was there from 1980 and left with my family in 1982 after a particularly brutal episode where three young women were sjambokked so severely that two required hospital treatment. Although the myth continues to be promoted that these were isolated incidents and that the situation improved in later years, documents from the ANC archive reveal a different story: in 1985, for example, the rebelliousness — it included large scale truancy from classes and thieving — had reached such a level that “the big stick” was ordered in to restore order.

That “Big Stick” — referred to as such by ANC president OR Tambo — was a man notorious for his brutality and abuse of women: Andrew Musondo. His tenure at Somafco eventually resulted in his removal and a commission on inquiry, the results of which have yet to be released by the ANC.

However, throughout this frequently shameful period, there existed a plethora of sound policies formulated by ANC educationalists, usually living and working abroad. Many of the students also arrived with innovative ideas. Together, these called for a new form of education that would be needed to help truly liberate a future South Africa; it would not be good enough merely to adapt the old. Yet that is precisely what happened in an often exaggerated way.

The same errors have again been perpetuated although — at least to a fairly large extent — corporal punishment has been done away with. However, in an atmosphere where many teachers still agitate for its return. And so we keep reliving our history.

Perhaps we should heed the words of writer Maya Angelou. She noted: “History, despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived. But, if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

* Bell was the founding principal of the Somafco primary division. He was in exile from 1965 and banned from 1966 to February 1990.