Left by the wayside

Another June 16 has come and gone. We were again flooded with media messages about the need to remember the heroic marchers who took to the streets and the courageous pupils who died, faced prison and fled into exile in the Soweto-inspired uprising that flamed across the country in 1976.

Veterans of that great movement came onto television sets - some familiar talking heads and others new - reminding us how it really was. This time we learnt more about the white man who was killed - a gentle soul serving as a psychologist in Soweto who found himself in the right place at the wrong time - the unfortunate target of indiscriminate black rage as police slaughtered high school pupils.

A white riot policeman called to urgent duty was not afraid to tell on TV how he simply did his job.

Some of the themes remain focused on the spectacular, with assertions left unchallenged.

The uprising in 1976 was not an ANC protest (it caught the comrades in exile off-guard) but one inspired by black consciousness organisations. This rebellion did not start and end in Soweto; it almost simultaneously saw youth uprisings elsewhere, from Atteridgeville to Athlone, during weeks of solidarity protests.

This was not about Afrikaans - though certainly that was the spark for the initial protests - but about the whole rotten system of Bantu education and the illegitimate government that imposed apartheid on society.

There certainly was a call for "liberation now, education later", but that was challenged from the start by wiser heads around the country who either called for "liberation through education" or renamed schools as "sites of struggle".

It is important to remember those events well, especially with the continuing displays of imitative action by superficial young people who have no idea what the cost of courage in 1976 really was.

The media heads make the massive leap from 1976 to 2013, posing questions about the meaning of that uprising for youth today.

I think we lost something in that noble struggle that we never recovered. We lost our attachment to education as a noble pursuit, as a vehicle for personal empowerment and social change.

We lost our respect for education authority - both teacher and inspector - so that it has become almost impossible to bring any supervisory function to what happens in schools without pushback from teacher unions.

We did not lose our attachment to schooling, for we still send our children to those buildings called schools in organised rituals established over a century. But education lost its soul in that necessary rebellion against apartheid schools and society.

We tried.

It was Nelson Mandela's government that installed programmes to recover "the culture of teaching and learning" as one of the Reconstruction and Development Programme initiatives; well, that did not happen. To recover a culture means more than distributing money, or appealing to some past value sets that gave deeper meaning to education. Cultures are elusive and can be rebuilt only through the hard work of change inside schools, as well as in society.

Yet there was a soul to education before 1976. This is powerfully illustrated in the stories, from cities and slums in towns and townships, in which ordinary South Africans recall teachers and their times in our book Great South African Teachers .

Yes, schools were sparsely furnished (they still are) and education policies were unjust. But behind the classroom door there was often a rich transaction between teacher and pupil, a genuine love for learning and an ethos of caring towards the young.

There was an unmistakable authority called a teacher, who was respected and well-regarded in broader society, too. Books were read and poems analysed. There was soul, in other words.

We got a brief glimpse of a revival of the spirit of 1976 as young people joined marches under the banner of Equal Education, one of the most inspiring citizen movements to emerge in recent times. These young people encounter the stubbornness of the proud in government, who cannot do something as simple as develop minimum standards for school infrastructure - in other words, provide the basis for the very things that the youth in the 1970s and 1980s demanded from a racist regime.

Such action by pupils offers a new politics "beyond itself", as a thoughtful colleague puts it, where youth act on behalf of others with an agenda that is not only non-violent but morally compelling in a country that in so many other ways has lost its soul.