When the tail wags the dog

It was one of the most disturbing images I had ever seen.

On the inside pages of a major newspaper last week, a photograph is shown of a principal running away from his pupils at Chris Hani High School in Khayelitsha, Cape Town.

The bespectacled principal looks young, perhaps in his 30s, and is definitely a man who thinks about matching clothes when he dresses for school every morning. But today the neatly dressed man is clearly running, and behind him Grade 12 pupils appear to be throwing things at him. It's a painful sight, a principal running for his life, with laughing pupils behind him.

The photograph represents so powerfully what is wrong with our schools - the complete loss of authority in education. The roots of this problem lie way back in the early days of our democracy. We inherited a "flat democracy" in which everybody decides about everything. The reaction to apartheid's iron fist was to make people pretend that we all decide about detail, and that there was no authority that could take the lead in decisions without everyone participating. This flat democracy took on farcical dimensions in the early years of our new government when right-wingers, racists and arch-conservative groupings were made to believe that their opinions on the interim constitution would count for something. The boxes of written commentary came rolling into parliament.

The people would govern.

I actually like this version of democracy. I thrive on the idea that people buy into a new plan or new policy. There is a deep sense of fulfilment when everyone in a company or community goes along with a new strategy. The chances of sustaining new leadership initiatives are greatly enhanced when there is broad support for that change.

Taken too far, though, what does this mean for leadership? What does flat democracy mean when leaders are so fearful of their followers that they are afraid to take a public stand? What if what the followers want is wrong or unethical? What if the leader's survival depends on the support of the followers, and she behaves accordingly? What if the followers believe they can violently attack or overthrow the leader since they put him there? What if the followers are like their leaders?

This is the dilemma of our democracy at the moment. Our political leaders are so fearful of their followers, including fellow leaders, that they find it difficult to discipline them early or firmly - which explains the rot in politics from the Union Buildings to the municipalities. And there is good evidence of what happens when leaders try to discipline their deputies - they get recalled to the position of former president.

This is what happened at Chris Hani High School - irrespective of what caused the attack by security guards on a pupil, the apparent spark of the protest.

Our pupils believe they can decide on the fate of a principal and defy any authority to run a school. Our unions sometimes meddle in the appointment of teachers, caring more about advancing comrades than ensuring competence.

Our students regularly fight university authorities across the land because they believe they can decide on catering and residence tenders.

Our councils on some campuses hold academic decisions hostage, not understanding that their roles are restricted to governance.

Some senates are loaded with non-academics, in the name of flat democracy, turning this academic body into a political circus with no capacity to adjudicate on research, teaching and learning. And that is why every year there are two or more universities run by ministerially appointed administrators.

To get our schools functioning again we need to be clear about different roles in our democracy. Teachers teach, pupils learn, governing bodies govern, unions advance the profession and protect their members from abuse, and education department officials finance and support the schools.

For this to happen, we need to give our leaders, the principals and their teams, the sacred authority to lead sensitively but firmly without fear of other actors crossing the lines of responsibility assigned to them.

And when a principal fails in their duty to lead, there are mechanisms for relieving that principal from duty - starting with the governing body and then the provincial department of education.

If this lawlessness in education continues, youth become used to wrecking the lives of leaders, undermining teaching and learning, and capsizing the project of democracy which is still very much under construction.