I want to connect the dots between seemingly isolated events on the educational landscape right now. Two beautiful grade 11 pupils at one of my favourite schools, La Rochelle Girls’ High School in Paarl, apparently committed suicide last week. Principal Amanda Lochner invited me regularly to this school to speak to future student leaders. The school has a healthy mix of class, character and culture, so much so that I always felt inspired by simply being there for my annual talk. I was therefore devastated to learn about the loss of these young souls.
We must never forget the enormous mental and emotional health stress brought on by the pandemic. Covid-19 is much more than a physical health crisis. It is one that has injected great fear, anxiety and even hopelessness among young and older children. In our book, Learning under Lockdown, the emotional toll of the disease on 400 children came through strongly and yet so much of public attention and resources are focused on bodily health. The tragedy at La Rochelle at the very least reminds us of other dimensions of child health that also need our urgent attention.
That is why the EFF’s decision to once again descend on Brackenfell High School this coming Friday is so disconcerting. Surely the anxiety of children about the pandemic and the final examinations would have been considered by the leadership of the red berets? Do these calculations about children’s emotional and educational needs matter in the logics of political actors beyond the racial make-up of a private, parent-arranged matric party?
Those children who are especially susceptible to pandemic distress and, in the case of Brackenfell High, political stress, are those who are already vulnerable by virtue of their emotional states. We do not know much about the personal lives of the La Rochelle girls, but I am sure they did not simply end their lives, as suspected, on the spur of the moment. Just as children do not enter schools equally in terms of academic readiness, there are also vast disparities among them in terms of their capacities to manage external stressors. We have a duty to nurture and protect these young hearts and minds, especially through the course of a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. Performance politics at the school gates in the middle of finals does exactly the opposite.
When you put such enormous pressure on young people, some of them will steal and cheat.
Our politics has truly descended into the gutter in recent years. Brackenfell is simply the consequence of the behaviour of a degraded, corrupt political class in SA, as parliamentary dust-ups have so amply shown. This week I received a copy of Barack Obama’s first of two presidential memoirs, A Promised Land, a massive tome of no less than 751 pages. There is a single paragraph on our country (page 337) that crisply captures our sorry state: “Much of the goodwill built up through [Nelson] Mandela’s historic struggle was being squandered by corruption and incompetence under ANC leadership, leaving large swathes of the country’s black population still mired in poverty and despair.”
It is that type of despair, by the way, that led to last week’s leakage of the mathematics paper 2 of the National Senior Certificate (NSC). We tend to think of such events as a supply problem, but it would not happen without demand from those desperate to pass this all-important, end-of-school examination. Let’s be clear, in educational terms this academic year has been lost. No professional educator will be able to say with a straight face that the 2020 final examinations will deliver a valid account of pupil knowledge and competence across the subject areas. Too much instructional time has been lost and, in the majority of our schools, the opportunity to learn during lockdown was virtually non-existent. And yet the department pushed ahead with the pretence of a national examination in which it is assumed we can make reliable judgments about learning for more than one million NSC candidates from vastly different circumstances.
When you put such enormous pressure on young people, some of them will steal and cheat. The impulsive reaction of the authorities is to commit to find the culprits; the more appropriate response from education officials would be to ask why we are pursuing this examination madness in the first place? As I have said many times since Covid-19 arrived on our shores, stop playing games with children’s lives; promote every child to the next grade and invest in a two-grade combined curriculum in 2021 that takes the pressure off teachers and pupils. Anything less is a dangerous gamble that will have mental and emotional health consequences for our children, not only educational ones.
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