The recent “diversity session” held by the Western Cape Education Department (WCED), which reportedly left some children at Fish Hoek High School “traumatised”, re-emphasises the need for solid partnerships between the department, school governing bodies (SGBs), teachers and parents, to avoid a repeat.
While the details of the session content still remain unclear, it is alleged that the session was premised on the deeply disturbing assertion that “only white people can be racist”. About 800 pupils were reportedly forced to attend the session while staff were banned from joining – even when a pupil, who managed to leave the session, called a teacher due to the nature of the content.
Section 28 of the Constitution states that children have the right to “parental care, or to appropriate alternative care when removed from the family environment”. In a school setting, teachers bear the duty to protect the interests of their pupils and ensure they are not intentionally exposed to harmful material, with the principal having oversight to make certain of this.
The recent events at Fish Hoek High School raise the question: if these two “gatekeepers” between the department and pupils had been involved in the session, could the events that transpired have been avoided?
The interaction between the SGB consisting of parents and guardians, the school and the department is a form of ground-level democracy that should be strenuously defended. The preamble of the South African Schools Act 84 of 1996 states its intention to “uphold the rights of all learners, parents and educators, and promote their acceptance of responsibility for the organisation, governance and funding of schools in partnership with the State”. This partnership model ensures that parents or guardians are consulted on the form of education received by pupils and that they have a body – the SGB – to channel disputes and engage on administrative or governance issues.
Both domestic law and court rulings hold that SGBs are best positioned as parents or guardians of pupils and members of their local community to ensure “democratic school governance”. The White Paper on Education and Training in a Democratic South Africa, 1995 states: “Parents or guardians have the primary responsibility for the education of their children, and have the right to be consulted by the state authorities with respect to the form that education should take and to take part in its governance.”
The White Paper on the Organisation, Governance and Funding of Schools, 1996 goes further to state that public school governance “is part of the country’s new structure of democratic governance” and that the SGB will have “substantial decision-making powers”.
The white papers are important founding documents that set out the state’s position with regard to education and are meant to set a benchmark for all other legislation to follow.
Read in Daily Maverick: “Diversity intervention suspended at Fish Hoek High after parents complain about traumatised learners”
Yet, the department seeks to usurp further power from the SGB through the Basic Education Laws Amendment Bill, 2022 (Bela Bill), which would empower the provincial education department heads to overrule SGBs on administrative and governance issues. The department, rather than the SGB with the school principal, would be the central decision-making power on matters such as language policies, admission, staff appointments and the leasing of facilities.
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In Head of Department: Department of Education, Free State Province v Welkom High School & Harmony High School (2013), the Constitutional Court held: “The importance of cooperative governance cannot be underestimated. It is a fundamentally important norm of our democratic dispensation, one that underlies the constitutional framework generally and that has been concretised in the Schools Act as an organising principle for the provision of access to education. Neither can we ignore the vital role played by school governing bodies, which function as a ‘beacon of grassroots democracy’ in ensuring a democratically run school and allowing for input from all interested parties.”
But it is not only the SGBs that play a crucial role – parents and educators shape the views and opinions of pupils and, therefore, need to be engaged and involved with all educational content. In particular, for training sessions that deal with highly sensitive issues such as diversity, equality or racism, parents and guardians need to be on board.
What should have been done
What are the lessons that should be learnt from the Fish Hoek High School case?
In addition to consulting the school principal and teachers on the planned content of the session, the WCED should have included teachers when communicating the content to pupils. Not forgetting the role of the school’s SGB, it would have also been useful to consult this body on the content (or at least the outline) of the session and perhaps even gauge their understanding of what constitutes racism and diversity – since this would have provided insight into the views and opinions of the pupils.
By disregarding the SGB and school faculty as important partners in the process, the WCED set itself up for failure.
We can only hope these events further highlight the crucial role of SGBs in holding the department accountable to parents and guardians of pupils, and the broader community in which a public school is situated.
The case also highlights the role that SGBs play as partners to the department by ensuring that content is appropriate, relevant and effectively communicated to pupils.
Of course, all partners will not always agree on all issues, but genuine engagement and open dialogue in the process are strong indicators of how seriously each party takes their respective responsibilities.
To subvert this model, as the Bela Bill seeks to do, would erode the ground-level democracy on which basic education in South Africa is founded. DM
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Diversity training is valuable in every instance, however it quickly can slip into ideology. A better equipped facilitator could have prevented this. However, I suspect they were aware of their own inadequacy, hence they removed the educators
The statement that “only white people can be racist” and its extension: “all white people are racist”, is a core concept in critical race theory, a militant ideology often found in RET rhetoric. Deeply disturbing indeed. Thanks for a well-informed and sensible article.
Not how I understand it. From Wikipedia: Critical race theory (CRT) is a cross-disciplinary examination, by social and civil-rights scholars and activists, of how laws, social and political movements, and media shape, and are shaped by, social conceptions of race and ethnicity. Goals include challenging all mainstream and “alternative” views of racism and racial justice, including conservative, liberal and progressive. The word critical in the name is an academic reference to critical thinking, critical theory, and scholarly criticism, rather than criticizing or blaming people.
In other words, it is THINKING about how the way we interact with each other is based on race.
Politicians around the world have weaponised this for their own power and gain and you have fallen for their ruse.
This is such a sound and deep analysis of not only the sensationalist part of the incident, but also the underlying cancer that is the BELA bill as it tries to wrest control away from parents and give it to politicians and bureaucrats who have failed to provide functional education system 28 years after they came to power (almost two generations now!). For interest SGB elections is the third biggest mandated democratic process after national and local elections.
The action / inaction / lack of oversight of the various role-players in this saga certainly need review. We also need to think about the future we are creating if we do not teach our children to deal with uncomfortable truths – i.e. are we creating a generation of snowflakes? Are we creating a generation of self-righteous people who believe that this “is my turn” and are therefore unwilling or unable to reach out and engage with “the other”?
Go read about the challenges that the American business leaders are trying to deal with as a generation that has never learnt to fail and has never had to deal with uncomfortable views that are different from theirs enter the workplace. And lets not make the same mistake.
Most importantly, lets be more vigilant against the silent erosion of collaborative governance, which leaves the ANC free to drive their own ideological views and massively outdated educational practices into the next generation of citizens.