JONATHAN JANSEN | There is much to rant about now, but let’s focus on kindness

This week a childhood friend died in isolation in a Johannesburg hospital after his organs failed and his brain was diseased by Covid-19. His wife could not touch him for days and his daughter abroad could not whisper love and appreciation in his final hours. Just like that, a man in his prime was gone. Whatever else happens around us, there is a great need to be gentle and kind to ourselves and others in these pandemic times.

I was going to be harsh this morning about things that disturb me about school and society. I was going to rage against the assassination of a principal on the grounds of his Buyani Primary School in Finetown, Gauteng. Lazarus Baloyi was a South African Democratic Teachers’ Union (Sadtu) official in Ennerdale and one immediately wonders if this had something to do with the corruption reported in the Volmink Report on the union, the recommendations of which minister of basic education has done little to implement. Imagine there were young children on the premises who would be scarred for life by this murder. For the children and the teachers, where would the softness come from, the love and the embrace?

Then I thought I might devote this column to that intriguing development at the University of Cape Town (UCT) at the weekend, where, in an instant, the name of Smuts Hall residence was changed to Upper Campus Residence until a more suitable designation could be found. The Chair of Council boasted that this action showed how far UCT had come under its new leader; one could argue that this impulsive act showed the opposite, how far this great university had not come since it burnt and covered up artworks. The move to change the name by the muscular charge of the EFF leadership of the SRC sounded like a victory for those of us who believe in symbolic restitution. But was it?

Where was the gentle, patient process of education and engagement that taught students about the complex shades of Jan Smuts before making the name-change decision? He was at one point a segregationist, like virtually all white South Africans of his time, as much as he was an internationalist, someone who had a hand in the establishment of the League of Nations, forerunner to today’s UN. Smuts, the botanist, lost his electoral bid to DF Malan, the theologian, who gave us apartheid. I am convinced most UCT students cannot write down three basic facts about Smuts. But being hard, bearish and uncompromising is the type of education we dish out in the name of progress.

I am convinced, by the way, that changing the names of places is what the weak among us do when they cannot change the material lives of our people, as Gqeberha knows all too well.

I used to have a hard, uncompromising view on school closures during the pandemic. It is now clearer to me that we need a softer approach that finds a middle way between the social, emotional and educational needs of children and protecting the health of teachers and pupils. Rotational scheduling is one of those compromises between total shutdown and total reopening. It keeps numbers low and might keep infections down if all other mitigation measures are also in place.

The problem with rotational scheduling is that it effectively cuts by at least half the actual teaching and learning opportunities for children without online connectivity or effective parental support at home; in other words, children from middle-class and wealthy families will flourish with rotation, while those from poor and working-class families fall even further behind.

What does a softer, considerate approach to the resolution of this sticky problem look like? It would, of course, have helped enormously if millions more were already vaccinated, on the one hand, and many thousands of schools equipped with online infrastructure since the hard lockdown of March 2020 on the other. But that is not our reality.

Under the circumstances, an approach that considers the vulnerable among us would return all children to school, but with insistence by provincial education departments that this can only happen when all the mitigating protocols are firmly in place. Is that too much to ask?  Our reality is a harsh and rapacious one. We steal PPE and resources before the very eyes of the most vulnerable among us, the children.

I honestly do not know how we claw back decency and consideration in these harsh, unforgiving times. But what you can offer in these mean days is the following: when your child or teacher relative departs for school, rotational or not, give her or him a hug, whisper some encouragement in the ear, make sure they know they are loved and reassure them in this pandemic that this too shall pass.