adminThe recent attack on a teacher at Glenvista High is just the latest indication that schools are microcosms of the broader society in which they exist.
Professor Deon Rossouw, CEO of the Ethics Institute of South Africa (EthicsSA), argues that schools hold a mirror up to society and can thus become enablers of a dysfunctional society by producing individuals who conform to its norms.
The good news is that schools can also act as catalysts for a new type of society. A school that is built on strong ethical foundations will create an environment that is safe for pupils and teachers and academic performance will improve as a result, Professor Rossouw has said. Over the longer term, such schools will play a role in changing society because their success will cause others to emulate them, and their alumni will take that ethical ethos into their adult lives.
On the question of academic performance, Professor Rossouw points out that South Africa’s consistently poor rankings internationally are shocking because they are not the result of a lack of funding.
Education is one the major items on the national budget, accounting for 18 percent of government’s planned expenditure and yet only half of the pupils that enter the system at grade 1 complete grade 12, and levels of literacy and numeracy among pupils remain dismally low. South Africa’s primary education was rated 132 out of 144 countries in the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report 2012-13, trailing countries like Malawi, Ethiopia, Bangladesh and El Salvador.
The causes for our lack of performance are pretty well known; they include teacher apathy, lack of discipline, non-delivery of textbooks, inappropriate union activity, lack of teaching skills. The solution, however, is not simply to add ethics to school curricula. Ethics need to be lived rather than taught, otherwise it will simply be seen as a purely academic exercise, of no relevance to real life.
Everyone in the school community has to buy into its ethical values – the governing body, the staff, the parents and the pupils. All these constituencies have to be involved in identifying the values; equally, all must be involved in rewarding those that exemplify them and censuring those that do not.
Such an approach will help create functional schools where pupils and teachers have respect for each other and for learning, and thus will produce better results. Such schools will also contribute to creating a more ethical-and thus more functional-society. — Sowetan.
Online Reporter