Education isn’t and shouldn’t be value free. Honest teachers know this. That is why a “hidden curriculum” is not a mystery to anyone with half an interest in education philosophy. Everything from the architecture of a school and the iconography on school grounds to the language of instruction, syllabi choices, rules about etiquette and behaviour on school trips and so on contributes to the institution’s identity and reveals the principles and values given primacy by the facility. Crucially, what is not part of the architecture and omitted from syllabi also reveals a lot about the school’s overall values.
I have, on many occasions, expressed my gratitude for excellent teachers who had a seminal influence on my development. Mr Grant, my history teacher at Graeme College in then Grahamstown (now Makhanda), gave me a copy of Thomas Nagel’s What Does It All Mean? when I was 13 or 14. I ended up studying academic philosophy after falling in love with the nature of the questions posed and explored in that book. I had educators such as Mr Holder, my music and English teacher, who made me fall in love with classical music and English. More important, Mr Holder role-modelled integrity when he publicly critiqued his peers, fellow staff members, for a dereliction of duty in the school hostel. The lesson I took, as a teenager, from his ethical solitude, is that doing right is important even if it makes you unpopular.
I could fill a book with stories of the influences these teachers and others had on me, as well as the types of values and principles upheld. My primary and high school education did not consist of value-free experiences, thankfully, because the world we live in needs us to be conscious of ethical and political challenges to which our generation is asked to respond.
In our history classroom, for example, Mr Grant put sticky tape on three walls. On it he plotted important historical moments in the ongoing story of our nascent democracy. It was there, not at university, that I was taught key pieces of apartheid legislation, such as the Immorality Act, Separate Amenities Act and so on. This instilled in us a fact-based understanding of the nature of apartheid political economy and so-called petty apartheid. This was beautifully complemented by a geography excursion to the top of one of the many hills on the outskirts of Grahamstown, from where we could see, and were told about, apartheid spatial planning in the valleys below.
These were not mere preparations to get great marks in the final matric exams, but crucial lessons, with implicit moral and political understanding instilled in us, of the society we live in. Us black kids were bussed into the suburbs from the townships and this deep historicism in the curriculum enabled us to know and understand the antecedent truths about South Africa that explained why it was only in 1991 that state schools were racially integrated. I remain grateful that a critical mass of teachers I was exposed to understood the power of their roles and performed them without fear of potential backlash.
I have been ruminating on some of these experiences as I am trying to make sense of some confusing reporting about an alleged racial fracas at a school in the Western Cape. A teacher, it seems, used a racial slur, which left many pupils upset (and rightly so). But there are reports that the facilitator brought in to help mediate conversations about race, racism and diversity did not handle the matter productively. However, I have yet to read a report that systematically and voluminously details the methodology, content of the workshops and objections of some parents. It is all rather vague, framed in clickbait headlines with prominent pull-out quotes that stir emotion. But there are a few important points, regardless of the facts.
The DA thinks race should be eliminated from our language and policies, and that racism emerges from the use of colour-coded language. That is, conceptually and historically, bullshit.
The Western Cape government and its education MEC David Maynier, in particular, should be watched carefully. They are delighted parents have complained about Fisk Hoek High School. The DA lives in a South Africa that does not exist, one in which race is apparently not a social identity that still has a powerful grip on our daily realities. The party thinks race should be eliminated from our language and policies, and that racism emerges from the use of colour-coded language. That is, conceptually and historically, bullshit.
Racism is real, even if race is biologically unreal. You only need a concept to be socially constructed for it to operate in material ways in the real world. The most spectacular counter-factual to DA politicians’ thinking is apartheid. If social constructions cannot impact the material world, then presumably apartheid is a figment of our black imaginations. The only way you can accept the trite truth that apartheid was real is to concede that you do not need race to be a stable biological entity for racism to be possible. You can, as white people did, oppress black people even in the absence of a coherent biological account of races. It is therefore conceptually woolly to pretend racism presupposes the existence of races. That isn’t the case.
Racism is possible because you and I can “other” one another regardless of what biology has to say about our phenotypical and other apparent, observable traits. Maynier, like many of his colleagues, are so emotionally and politically vested in avoiding difficult conversations about racism that they will clutch onto the weakest of reasons to mandate that schools not teach children about race, racism, diversity and inclusion. The DA’s position is identical to that of Republican politicians in the US. We should not let any provincial or national government fail our children by churning out school leavers with a false understanding of history and its reach into the present.
Which brings me to the incomplete reporting on the work of the diversity expert hired by the school in question. Let’s assume, for sake of argument, that she did a poor job. The correct conclusion to draw is that someone else should be brought into the school and, perhaps, that provincial and national education departments should start thinking of a standard curriculum for all our schools, one that includes time spent on important civic-related matters such as constitutionalism, forms of domination (not restricted to race, but including ableism, class prejudices, xenophobia, queerphobia and so on) and why it is important to be anti-racist, nip misogyny in the bud, be self-aware of class and other biases.
How on Earth can it be “controversial” to aim to have school leavers who are committed to the baseline values of our constitution — dignity, equality and freedom? Racist parents should not scare any education MEC. What is right is not always a matter of tallying up preferences in your WhatsApp group. By that reasoning we would never, as a country, have made so many breakthroughs in the fight for substantive equality for queer people. So there is no need for any decent educator or school principal to panic just because a bored person on Twitter is trolling them for being progressive or writing a predictable letter to a newspaper.
Yet by conveniently putting one diversity trainer on trial in public, people in positions of power who are moral cowards who do not want to confront the institutional prejudices and shameful historical legacies of our former Model-C and private schools in particular, can change the subject (if we fall for their rhetorical trickery). We should not let them get away with it. One person’s argument that “blacks cannot be racist” is not proof that we should not talk about race, racism and other forms of oppression in our schools. We should. The real debate should be about what to teach and how to teach it.
Choosing silence in the face of oppression’s ongoing manifestations is pedagogically irresponsible. Perhaps the real fears of some parents are that their children will come home one day and force them, as adults, to self-examine ways in which we are all implicated in the structural injustices of our country. The longer we avoid going there, the longer we will remain a deeply divided society. Now is not the time for dishonest silence. There is too much at stake.
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