Andrew Kenny: Confused racial psychology governs ANC attitudes to white teachers - Biznews

South African schools face severe challenges, with most producing poor educational outcomes, though a few excel. The ANC elite send their children to top schools while undermining them, influenced by racial dynamics and political policies. Issues include unqualified teachers, union corruption, and harmful policies like BELA. Political reform is crucial for improvement.

Andrew Kenny

Most South African schools are doing very badly, producing some of the worst educational outcomes on Earth. But some, a select few, are doing very well, the match for the best schools elsewhere. 

What is the response of the ruling ANC elite? It is two-fold, full of strange, confused racial psychology. First, they make sure that their own children go to the good schools. Second, they attack the good schools, and go out of their way to demoralise and intimidate them. They want their children to be taught in schools where most of the teachers are white, and then they accuse these whites of racism, and try to drive some of them out of teaching.

The 2023 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which looks at 59 countries around the world, saw South African pupils slide in all categories except Grade 9 maths in its 2019 study. South African Grade 5 pupils came last in maths and science, despite being rated against Grade 4 pupils from other countries. The only other African country in the study was Morocco, but similar studies that included other African countries, most of them poorer than South Africa, showed that many of them performed better than we do. The 2021 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) ranked South Africa last out of 57 participating countries, with 81% of our children unable to comprehend a basic text.

In other words, our education system for most children is not only abysmal but getting worse. Why? What should be done? We know the answers to both questions – very simple answers. We know exactly how to improve our education, and we also know that as long as the black elite of the ANC and other “progressive” parties are in power, there is not a hope in hell that they will allow these improvements. On the contrary, they and their woke allies in the DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) movement go out of their way to attack the few good schools remaining in the country. The ANC’s greatest betrayal of poor black people in  our country is the bad education of their children. They have made it clear that they want it to stay like that.

Our education system is not failing through lack of money. We spend a bigger proportion of our GDP on education than most countries, and far more than other countries in Africa. It is not so much that our schools are under-resourced, although some are horribly under-resourced. 

The most awful example is our shameful pit-latrines, in which some very young pupils have died terrible deaths, for which the ANC is 100% to blame. Nor is it so much that class sizes are too big, with too many pupils per teacher. The biggest problem is the teachers. Too many of our teachers are unqualified, lazy, ill-disciplined, irresponsible, incompetent and, worst of all, couldn’t give a damn about the welfare of the children in their charge. 

They care only about their own working conditions. Most of them depend on the Mafia-like teaching union, the SA Democratic Teachers Union (SADTU), for their jobs. SADTU sees to it that their schools are never inspected, their teachers’ performance is never monitored, and errant teachers are never disciplined. Their teachers do not spend the required hours in class, often absenting themselves on Mondays and Fridays, or for union meetings in school time. The ANC cringes before SADTU, which is said to rule education in seven of our nine provinces. 

The black elite, including SADTU teachers, are well aware of how terrible SADTU schools are, which is why they never send their own children to them, but instead to private schools or Model-C schools (partly private schools). The chances of the ANC defying SADTU are nil, and so our education is doomed as long as the ANC is in power.

I spent five years as a high school teacher in maths and science. I have degrees in maths, physics and engineering but no teaching diploma, and so could never get a permanent teaching job at any state school in South Africa. Anyone with Grade 8 in maths and science and with a teaching diploma could get such a job. 

I taught in 1971 at Livingstone High School in Claremont, Cape Town; then in 1972 at Caludon Castle Comprehensive School for boys in Coventry, England; and then in 1974 at Tring Arts Educational School for girls in England. The best school was Livingstone, which then fell under the Coloured Affairs Department. It had the worst resources by far of the three schools and its teachers were under constant attack by the apartheid government; some of them were terrorised by thugs from the security police, some were put under house arrest, some denied promotion because of their anti-apartheid views. 

Some of the pupils came from the poorest, most crime-ridden parts of the Cape Flats. Class sizes were huge. But the school was very successful, getting good matric results, including in maths and physics, because they had dedicated, hard-working, highly disciplined teachers who put the welfare of their pupils before everything else. They taught with old-fashioned teaching methods (still used by Far Eastern countries, which have some of the best educational outcomes of all).

The best resourced by far of the schools I taught at was Caludon Castle. This was a purpose-built comprehensive school with splendid facilities. It had wonderful, fully equipped school buildings, with roomy classrooms and modern science laboratories. It had a good gymnasium and huge sports fields. It was a dreadful school. 

The socialist Labour Party government had championed comprehensive schools to replace the state grammar schools, which admitted clever children of all classes who had passed the 11-plus exam at eleven years old. This divided pupils on merit, which Labour thought was elitist, and so it established comprehensive schools to which all children regardless of class or intelligence would go. (Joke! Joke!) 

Actually, the class division was increased, and comprehensive schools were almost exclusively attended by working-class children, intelligent and unintelligent. None of the socialist leaders sent their own children to comprehensive schools, except for a few elite ones in rich bourgeois suburbs. Clever working-class children were doomed to bad education. The Caludon Castle boys were almost entirely working-class, who knew they could leave school with no qualification and automatically get a well-paid job on an assembly line in one of the local car factories. Times have changed.

The mood at the school was dismal. Any aspiring young boy who wanted to study and improve himself was jeered at as a “swot” and soon brought down. The teachers put in the required hours and went through the required motions but most of them hated the school. Only 20% of the boys left the school with any school-leaving certificate at all. All curiosity, wonder and yearning to learn was soon crushed out of them. Making it worse, especially in maths, was that English education was then undergoing a proto-woke transition. Instead of learning the times-tables and the other foundations of maths and arithmetic, the boys were taught set theory (utterly useless for a schoolchild) and the binary system, and spent a lot of time in sand boxes cutting out things on pieces of paper. In a maths meeting, I pointed out that to do the binary system, the boys needed to be able to divide by two, which they could not do. I was jeered down as a South African fascist.

The Tring school for girls, which was private, was much better, but not as good as Livingstone. It had pretty good facilities and teachers, and mainly a pleasant mood. Its main educational purpose was to teach art, music and ballet to girls, but by law it had to have a minimum academic curriculum, and I helped to provide the maths and science for that. I taught O-Level maths and got good results for the girls, which was all they asked of me. Fortunately, Tring still taught the good, old-fashioned maths.

That was 47 years ago. I left teaching to be a labourer in a brickyard, and then later got various jobs in factories and power stations. Teaching was by far the hardest job I ever had, and I’d hate to go back to it. Fortunately, with my qualifications and skin colour, I’d never get a job in most state schools, and a job in a Model-C or private school has become perilous for white people like me. My sympathies are entirely with the good, dedicated teachers we still have, black and white.

In South Africa most state schools have been wrecked by the ANC’s policies of transformation (kicking out the whites), affirmative action (making appointments where race is a criterion rather than pure merit) and employment equity (since 93% of South Africans are black, 93% of teachers should be black). But the black elite makes sure that their own children never go to schools where any of this applies. They choose schools where most of the teachers are white and then they try to seize these schools and ruin them under what Richard Wilkinson has called State Capture. A recent example was at Pretoria High School for Girls (PHSG).

A group of 12 white girls at PHSG was accused of racism because of messages they sent to each other in a WhatsApp group, where they were said to have made horrible racist remarks against the black girls. ANC politicians, the local education authority, Gauteng Department of Education (GDE), the mainstream media, including, as usual, the Daily Maverick (DM), and the DEI mobsters immediately all rushed in to accuse the white girls of racism without being able to produce a shred of evidence and without knowing what they had said in their WhatsApp messages. 

The DM had a cartoon of a weeping black girl. The 12 white girls and the white principal were suspended. An independent disciplinary tribunal found all the white girls innocent, and asked them to be re-instated. The GDE ignored this finding and insisted, without evidence, that PHSG was racist, and ordered an enquiry under the MEC, Mr Matome Chiloane. The findings of the enquiry were described by the School Governing Board (SGB) of PHSG as “so vague, unproven and unprovable that it doesn’t belong in any self-respecting report”. I’ve read the full findings and find the SGB’s remarks too charitable. Here is an extract from the enquiry: “In addition, there are learners and staff members that are of the view that racism exists at PHSG but it is subtle or disguised. According to them, this is their lived experience at PHSG.” Let me translate this jargon: “subtle or disguised” means “non-existent”; “lived experience” means “imaginary”; it means “the truth is what I feel it is”. I can’t say often enough that all these stupid ideas come only from certain sections of the black elite and never from ordinary black people. In this case, even Thabo Mbeki, who in the past specialised in sniffing out white racism, declared that the racial witch-hunt against whites at PHSG was nonsense.

School capture, the destruction of the best schools in South Africa, is supported by the ANC elite but pioneered by DEI goons who make fortunes by stirring up racial hatred. People such as Ms Asanda Ngoasheng warn the best schools that they must pay her huge amounts of money (R70,000 or more) for each of her “diversity training workshops”, or else they will be in trouble. The schools timidly agree. She then tells the white children that their parents and teachers are evil racists; she tells the black children they are helpless, hopeless victims of white racism who cannot possibly help themselves by hard work and study but must spend all their time complaining about white racism and insisting that the schools pay her even more money for more of her workshops. 

The DEI brigade care absolutely nothing about a four-year-old black girl drowning in the pit latrine of a state school or state schools producing terrible education for poor black people or poor black girls being impregnated by their teachers at state schools. All they care about is the fact that a white teacher might mispronounce the name of a rich black girl or make a remark about her hair. The DEI gang have been highly successful in damaging our good schools and demoralising their teachers. At St Mary’s Girls’ school in Pretoria, all six maths teachers resigned as a result of DEI assault, which makes me as an ex-maths teacher all the more determined never to take up teaching again.

At any school, policy is decided by the politicians, the teaching trade unions, the parents and the SGBs. The ANC wants to take power away from the parents and the SGBs and give it all to the politicians and the trade unions. This is the main purpose of the Basic Education Laws Amendment (BELA) Bill, now signed into law by President Ramaphosa. (The secondary purpose is to get rid of Afrikaans, an African language, and insist on all teaching in English, the colonial, imperialist language of Cecil John Rhodes.) Under BELA, the destruction of our schools will accelerate.

The ANC, proposing to destroy the schools to which it sends its own children, is like a man sawing off the branch he is sitting on. Why? I once heard a privileged black pupil at an elite school complaining that she wanted a teacher “who looks like me”. But most schools in South Africa have teachers that do look like her. Why didn’t she attend one of them? The reason is that she doesn’t want teachers “who look like me”; she wants white teachers and then she wants to accuse them of racism. Why this strange racial psychology? Some of the black elite feel that the only solution to all problems in South Africa is attacking the whites, even in cases, such as education in some schools, when they are benefiting from them.

How to improve education in South Africa? Allow all parents to send their children to the schools where the ANC elite sends theirs. Get rid of transformation, affirmative action and employment equity. Appoint teachers on merit only. Curb the corruption and excessive power of SADTU. Allow school inspectors full authority to monitor the performance of all teachers, and recommend the dismissal of those who do not perform. Dismiss teachers who do not put in the required hours of teaching. Allow schools to refuse DEI invasion without prejudice, and force DEI to be open and honest and back up all their allegations with facts. Reject stupid modern teaching fads and use the basic, proven teaching methods of the past. Above all, give free choice of schools to all parents. I don’t know how you could inspire teachers and bring a love of learning to pupils in a school like Caludon Castle Comprehensive but I do know that these measures would enormously change education in South Africa for the better. The only obstacles to them are political.

Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal

https://www.biznews.com/rational-perspective/2024/12/08/andrew-kenny-white-teachers

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.