While American students hit their snooze buttons and miss yet another morning class, South African students march through streets with true appreciation for the freedom to sit in a sub-par classroom — and learn.
A mass of South African students flocked to Cape Town, South Africa City Hall in September to make a seemingly simple demand. They want educational resources and educators.
The fact that picketing is necessary for such basic necessities reveals the impossibility of acquiring such demands to end educational inequality.
Equal Education, an organization founded by AIDS activist Zackie Achmat and others, started the movement dedicated to informing the Cape Town government about educational inequities. Achmat, a former protestor against apartheid, told The New York Times that Equal Education aims to teach government officials and instructors about the importance of educating students.
Last year, Equal Education gave out disposable cameras to students and asked them to take pictures of their egregious educational environments. The images revealed everything from overcrowded classes, leaky roofs and cracked desks, to entire classrooms reading from a single textbook.
One of the most stark group of images was from high school student Zukiswa Vuka showing more than 500 broken windows at Luhlaza High School. Students are forced to study shivering in classrooms during winter.
Dilapidated classrooms aside, students have the added obstacle of their own teachers, many of whom either do not show up for class, or are not thoroughly educated.
A case study was done on 3rd grade teachers. The teachers were given a 6th grade literacy test and, disappointingly, more than half received a score of 50 percent or less.
The absence of qualified teachers is due mostly to the Bantu educational system, which arose from apartheid. The goal of apartheid was, of course, to create uneducated, menial laborers among South Africa’s black population. The inequality in education there shows that racial problems still exist.
Schools are given almost no authority to do anything other than issue a warning for teachers who skip class. The lack of accountability has become dangerously evident. Students on the verge of graduation at Kwamfundo High School erupted in violence when the school failed to return or replace their truant teacher.
This coupling of anger and an insatiable hunger to learn is largely due to national exams. The exams, if failed, pit students into facing a potential lifetime of unemployment and squalor.
Graeme Bloch, an education researcher at the Development Bank of Southern Africa, was quoted in The New York Times, saying, “Inequality continues … white kids do reasonably and black kids don’t really stand a chance unless they can get into a formerly white school or the small number of black schools that work.”
While there is motivation for many students to get an education, with so much working against them, only half graduate high school.
There are a few exceptions to the mess. Arthur Mgqueto, a math teacher at Kwumfundo, goes above and beyond typical teaching. Not only does he come to school every day, but he also comes early and on weekends — without pay —for extra sessions.
A large number of students attend these sessions in order to prepare themselves for a future that may never come — one that will surely sink deeper without the internal and external pressures for reform that brought an end to apartheid.
Jean Kim is a creative writing major and a contributing writer for the Daily 49er.
