Teachers can help build a better tommorrow

BY CLAIRE BAKER

After falling victim to crime, teacher CLAIRE BAKER reflects on how educators can contribute towards forming good citizens of tomorrow.

I was burgled again last week, as I write this. I’ve lost count but I think it might be the seventh or eighth time that I have been relieved of my valuables.

I’ve got no worries about camels and eyes of needles. Of course, once the neighbours heard about the burglary they were eager to share their own horror stories. Stories of hijackings, armed robbery, assault, stabbings, all-night torture…it really is the stuff of crime fiction.

And yet all of these things have happened to the ordinary people living in my little suburban street. And as I stood chatting across the front fence to a man whose son was stabbed seven times, I thought how lucky I was that, although I had lost tens of thousands of rands worth of my things, no-one had been hurt.

They broke into my house in the middle of the night. They violated my sanctuary and robbed me of my possessions, but they left me and my family to sleep in our beds, and for that I was grateful.

But what kind of country are we living in when we find ourselves feeling grateful after something like that? When we are no longer that impressed or concerned about something like burglary.

You might have thought when you read the opening paragraph:  “Burglary? Come on. That’s not so bad. At least no-one was hurt.”

At least no-one was hurt. My aunt has been robbed at gunpoint by gangs no fewer than three times, and when we speak of it, that’s what we say: “At least she wasn’t hurt.”

The imminence of often extreme violence is so great in our life that, no matter what else happens to us, we consider ourselves lucky if we escape physical harm. Crime has become so commonplace in our society that we accept anything but the most heinous incursion into our lives or privacy.

It is not just the extent of the crime, but the nature of it. We seem to have become a country predisposed to random and gratuitous violence. And more and more, people are asking the same question: Why? Why is there so much violence? Why is it so extreme?

If you’ve asked this question, you have probably come across an answer that includes the word “apartheid” somewhere. But I am not going to give you the usual list of side-effects of this inescapable shadow of our past.

It is easy to draw a causal relationship between poor education and high unemployment and high crime rates. But when you look at the unusual violence of crimes and the disregard with which individuals are being treated, then you see the true cost of apartheid.

Apartheid is what rendered human life worth so little in South Africa today. It did so by telling generations of an entire nation that they were ugly and useless. It inculcated into many of those it subjugated a deeply pervasive lack of self-worth.

What we are seeing in South Africa today is a profound lack of respect. Not the kind of lack of respect that your grandmother accused you off when you gave her lip. It’s something far deeper and more dangerous than that: lack of self-respect. Why respect the law, or other people’s property, or even other people’s lives, when you have so little respect of your own?

It is this that I believe is the worst and most insidious result of apartheid. Low self-worth generates a vicious cycle that, together with the other problems facing the young people of today, provides them with little reason not to turn to crime.

The self-respect of a young man who is undereducated and unemployed and is lacking in sufficient confidence to find himself a job will be further eroded by his continued unemployment. Or course, there are many who are strong enough to rise above their circumstances; who are imbued with a sense of self-worth.

Lacking in internal and innate self-worth, so many young people have sought external means of assuring themselves of their value. They seem to have become overly materialistic. I was saddened to hear of young girls choosing their boyfriends based on what a particular man would buy them: clothes, jewellery, cellphones. They would simply go to the highest bidder.

They might be saying: “If you think I’m worth it, you should be prepared to pay for me.” But are they not simply asking “If you’re prepared to pay for me, am I not worth something?”

I was told a story some weeks ago that sickened me. A primary-school teacher at a very poor inner-city school relayed a conversation she overheard between a pupil and the headmaster.

The headmaster stopped a pupil and asked her why she didn’t have a school jersey. The child replied that it was because her parents were poor and could not afford to buy her one. To which the headmaster responded: “No, that’s not the reason. You don’t have a jersey because you’re a nothing, your parents are nothings and you’re a nothing too.”

I am appalled that someone, especially a person in a position of responsibility like that, chooses to undermine a child who is already beaten down by a difficult life.

Teachers should be doing the exact opposite of this. Every day they should be telling those children in front of them that they respect them, that they are important, that they are worthy of love, that they are beautiful.

Surely this is their parents’ job, one might argue. I don’t dispute this. But the fact is that apartheid did a good job of telling their parents what that headmaster told that little girl.

The business leaders of this country have acknowledged that, although it may be something not usually required in the normal course of business, it is the responsibility of corporate South Africa to put aside significant amounts of money for the development.

The state of our country is such that we cannot rely solely on government to work towards things like improved education, housing and health services. And so it is when it comes to teaching.

Teachers are being forced to take on greater responsibility not just for the intellectual but also the emotional development of our youth. (As if teachers don’t have enough on their plates already!)

But didn’t teachers always do this, to some extent? I believe we would make a grave mistake to underestimate the effect that teachers have on children.

There were two teachers who played a pivotal role in my development when I was a child. The first was an English teacher who was dynamic, supportive and interested. I don’t remember anything in particular that she said or did, but I know that I always felt confident in her classroom.

The other was an art teacher who was critical and judgmental. He had his favourites and I was not one of them. I also don’t remember exactly what he said to me at any one time, but I do remember feeling wholly inadequate and incompetent in that large art-room—which may explain why you’re currently reading an article and not looking at a painting.

I know that this theory can easily be shot down. The idea that teachers could play a role in addressing crime, not to mention the greater psychological well-being of the country, may be fanciful. And I have nothing more to support it than my own personal experiences and intuition.

My reasoning may be faulty, my logic flawed. And it probably isn’t fair to expect teachers to do this, on top of everything else that we require of them.

Still, it doesn’t take much effort, and I think we could do worse than to convince the children we know that they are the children of God and they are loved.