There is nothing wrong with the mission of Hoërskool Jan de Klerk. “To educate our learners in all areas so that they can go out into the world as well-balanced individuals, make a meaningful contribution to society and lead fulfilling lives.” Nor is there anything wrong with the five values that also appear on the Facebook site of this Krugersdorp high school: respect, excellence, accountability, loyalty, integrity.
Except that a week ago the school made national headlines when a video was posted online about an all-out classroom brawl in which uniformed Jan de Klerk pupils punched each other silly while one of the pupils (I use the word loosely) jumped onto the back of an elderly teacher, choking the man with one arm and pointing him to the brawl with the other. Because this is SA, it would be noticed that the boys in this almighty fight were black and the teacher white. Jan de Klerk, a Nationalist politician who was also the father of the last white president, FW de Klerk, must have been spinning in his grave.
The media have already reported the facts of the case, the possible motivations for the fight and the disciplinary actions on the cards from the Gauteng department of education. What else is going on here and what does it tells us about the future of nonracial education in SA?
This was clearly a former white Afrikaans school that desegregated quickly after the end of apartheid. The online photos indicate this is now a black school in terms of enrolments and the elderly teacher is probably one of a dwindling number of white educators in the school. When schools opened up around 1994, parents from township schools clearly saw the opportunity to educate their children at relatively well-resourced institutions with good subject teachers and excellent matriculation results. These ordinary public schools had affordable fees compared to the elite public schools and, of course, the super-expensive private schools. So far so good.
What we don’t talk about is that often these schools attracted pupils from dysfunctional schools where cultures of teaching and learning had broken down long ago — the reason the parents wanted them out. The problem is these young people came into the newly opened white schools with the troubled mindsets and emotional dispositions that wreak havoc in the receiving institutions. Suddenly, disciplinary problems escalate and the schools find themselves in constant turmoil.
There were two problems. One is capability, for the white schools really did not know how to restore discipline in the daily disruptions they now faced. Notice in the video the white teacher standing by helplessly not knowing how to de-escalate the brewing situation. Another is race, for any harsh action could in an instant be recorded, distributed and interpreted as racism. Remember the white teacher at Wessel Maree secondary school in the Free State town of Odendaalsrus who last month pushed a black pupil who stood chest to chest with him challenging his authority? Well, that teacher is now suspended.
The consequences of such destructive breakdowns in school culture and classroom discipline are all too familiar from our research on desegregating schools. In time, the all-white school becomes an all-black school with the last remaining white pupils yanked out by their parents and placed in functional white-majority schools. The first wave of white children to depart leaves because of racism, when the school reaches a tipping point in black enrolments; the second wave happens when the school has become too seriously dysfunctional for academic purposes.
In time, the all-white school becomes an all-black school with the last remaining white pupils yanked out by their parents and placed in functional white majority schools.
More slowly but inevitably, every white teacher (and principal) also leaves and you know have a black school with all the features of the dysfunctional schools that concerned black parents fled in the first place. I have seen this over and over again from Diversity High (former JG Strijdom) in South Hills, Johannesburg, to Sans Souci Girls in Newlands, Cape Town.
What does the country lose? The opportunity for white and black children to be educated in the same spaces where the crucial skills of learning and living together are acquired before they step into the broader world.
Clearly the majority of black children entering former white schools come with the resolute purpose of bettering their chances in education; the parents hold them to account. But make no mistake, in accessible schools with reasonable fee structures, the young people from dysfunctional schools can debilitate those institutions very quickly.
Fortunately, there are models of integration in schools across the country that demonstrate how both goals can be achieved: open access to all our children and create integrated learning environments that are sustainable. We should learn from them instead of thinking the heavy hand of reactive discipline solves anything at all.
