An open letter to comrade Thobile Notla - president of the SA Democratic Teachers' Union

Dear Comrade,

Allow me to join President Zuma in congratulating your union for the excellent work it's not doing.

Your efforts in the Eastern Cape in particular are paying less-than-handsome dividends. A lot of people might disagree with me, but I think the Eastern Cape is a shining example of what can't be achieved through a sustained campaign of resistance to learning.

Education has destroyed lives and made countless people miserable. Our eternally cheerful president is a living manifestation of the proverb, "ignorance is bliss". To clear up any confusion, I am not referring to ProVerb, the rapper from Joburg.

The teachers who belong to your union serve South Africa far better on strike than they do in the classroom. An educated child is an angry child. That is why I like the Transkei so much. There are no angry children. They stand on the side of the road and smile and wave and ask for sweets. In countries ravaged by education, Greece, for example, children throw petrol bombs and rocks at the police.

I need not tell you that knowledge is a dangerous drug. I tried it once when I was younger, and right away I wanted more. The counter-revolutionary teachers at the white school I attended had no qualms about feeding my need. They made me what I am today, the bastards.

For me, spelling was the gateway drug. They had me hooked at "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". When I discovered it was a pangram - a sentence that willfully uses every letter of the alphabet - I spun out of control. Grammar became my heroin. Then they slipped me some biology and after that there was no stopping me. I smoked history and freebased French. I snorted science and mainlined maths. Those last two landed me in a heap of trouble, I can tell you. The pushers called it detention. I called it rehab.

By refusing to teach, your members are doing the next generation a huge service. Come to think of it, even when they are on strike, they are still teaching. They are teaching children that money is more important than anything else in the world. This is the only lesson children need to learn these days. Well done, comrade. President Zuma will probably give you an award.

Some say that education leads to wealth. This is a filthy lie perpetrated by the hollow-eyed hobgoblins who haunt the halls of academe. You don't need a degree to make money.

What you need is a genealogist, someone who can draw up a family tree to determine precisely who you are related to in government.

Then it's a couple of phone calls, a meeting in a parking garage and Bobo's your uncle: you're well on your way to your first million.

By the way, those women in the Eastern Cape who have spent the last few weeks singing and dancing instead of teaching? You might want to tell them that "I'm so hungry I could eat a horse" is an idiom and should not be taken literally.

I know it's hard to tell your idioms from your idiots these days, but it's also not easy to empathise with the poor when they weigh half a ton, even if they are light on their feet and quick with a song.

Keep on striking. The last thing this country needs is more smart-ass kids who think they have all the answers. And, for god's sake, get some white members. People are beginning to suspect that whiteys are happy to teach simply because they love the profession. Bloody imperialist puppets. How dare they.