JONATHAN JANSEN | Sour note: classrooms in SA are heartbreakingly soulless

Opening a new school hall in a deprived township on the first day of the new term this week, the principal pointed to a large open field that had been fenced off by the department of public works, which owns the land. This is school property but off limits for the 741 children who are cramped into little more than concrete structures that contain them for several hours every day. What this means is that there are no sports grounds for netball, soccer, rugby or a modest athletics track. The obvious message is that poor and working-class children do not deserve places to run free, play and expend their youthful energies on open playing fields.

What this also means is that these children are destined to experience an impoverished curriculum devoid of physical education, sports and other open-air activities. It is, moreover, a curriculum starved of anything but the basics like numeracy and literacy. Arts, music and drama might appear in the formal CAPS curriculum, but in reality these subjects are for the fancy schools because you need to have money to pay for specialist teachers and for that you need parents with deep pockets and schools who can afford fundraisers. Not here in an environment where more boys go to prison than to university. Are we surprised?

It needs to be said over and over again that not all children will excel in science, mathematics and technology. There are those who will achieve at the highest level in music, dance and creative drawing, but if they never have the opportunity to try their hand in these disciplines, how will they know what they’re really good at? Put differently, how much talent slips through our hands because there was no school piano or gymnastic equipment or a hockey field?

Real learning after all is not simply a head thing it is also a matter of the heart.

Make no mistake, teachers in disadvantaged schools try their best. A girl is encouraged to perform in the school assembly on Monday the kind of spiritual dancing moves she did at church on Sunday. A teacher who sings only in the shower has a passion for teaching singing in her class but without being able to read sheet music. These educators try but they know their limits and settle for the fact that the majority of the children will never be exposed to a specialist music teacher and have the quality of school choir like the well-heeled schools on the other side of the highway. Where a school might find itself lucky to have a teacher who is a pianist who can read music, it is rare and accidental not the result of an HR recruitment plan for an enriched music curriculum.

An impoverished curriculum is soul-deadening for children. Real learning after all is not simply a head thing it is also a matter of the heart. Counting and climbing, reading and rhythm, go together. Deep learning means being able to draw on all the senses such as appreciating a melody as it falls on the ear or feeling the goosebumps from a line beautifully expressed in dramatic performance. A rich and expansive curriculum is what makes us human, not the recitation of cold facts that must be mastered for an examination.

All is not lost. I have been working with school leaders who reach out, ones who realise their role is not simply compliance with tightly regulated curriculum timelines but also to educate children in the broadest sense of that word. And there is no shortage of expert groups willing to respond to enterprising principals and help their schools with the arts; to be able to see famed actress Denise Newman or the rising star in the performing arts and author of children’s books, Bianca Flanders, inspire teachers and learners alike through drama, music, and reading is truly astounding. Gcina Mhlope’s storytelling work across schools in the country is legendary.

A well-known orchestra visited a school the other day and did what they called an instrument zoo where children could experiment with a range of instruments to see what they fancied. Another group visited the school and left behind musical instruments large and small for this township school to use. Volunteers flocked to the school to teach music and now a full-throated school choir is ringing out the beats.

At another underserved school I work with a determined teacher (Zimbabwean, for your information) taught his children the basics of robotics and exposed them to regional and national competitions where they did exceptionally well; these high schoolers without a cent to their name just returned from robotics competitions in Boston and Maryland in the USA with the goodwill of some local companies and good friends on the east coast of America. It was nerve-racking for all concerned given slim budgets and lots of uncertainty, but that teacher and his team were so determined not to settle for an impoverished curriculum.

This is what we’re left with for now. Local initiative, enterprising school leaders, passionate teachers, supportive expertise from the broader community combining a healthy dose of private sector funding and talented volunteers. In the meantime, your government is out on the campaign trail trying to dupe you (again) with the message that after next year’s elections, things will be better. As the kids like to say, LOL.